Name: Baked Gooseberry Pudding
Ingredients: 1 pint gooseberry juice; 3 eggs; 1.5 ounces butter; sugar to taste; crust for the dish; crumbs of rolls or 4 ounces Naples biscuits

Why it works: Gooseberry and biscuit share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Baked Gooseberry Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

Stew gooseberries in a jar over a hot hearth or in a saucepan of water until they pulp.
Press the pulp through a coarse sieve to obtain 1 pint of juice.
Beat and strain the yolks and whites of 3 eggs.

Make the filling

Mix the gooseberry juice, beaten eggs, and butter together.
Sweeten the mixture to taste and pour it into a dish lined with crust.
Mix in a few crumbs of rolls or Naples biscuits for consistency.

Bake

Bake for 30 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Gooseberry + biscuittop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together12 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Butter + biscuittop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together2,009 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Sugar + biscuittop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,874 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).
Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).
Butter + sugartop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together98,233 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Eggs: Bind the filling and help it set into a custard-like texture when baked.
Gooseberry juice: Supplies the tart fruit flavor and most of the liquid in the filling.
Butter: Adds richness and a smoother, softer texture to the filling.
Crumbs of rolls or naples biscuits: Absorb excess liquid and thicken the filling for a firmer consistency.