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Sauce

Gooseberry Sauce

A sauce made by stewing gooseberries, sieving them, and mixing with butter and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 98,233 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Gooseberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Stew the gooseberries until tender, but not overdone.

  2. Rub them through a sieve.

  3. Add the sieved gooseberries to the melted butter and sugar.

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.

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.

  1. Sugar + buttertop 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

Gooseberries
Provide the tart fruit base, whose pulp gives the sauce its body and sharp flavour.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, silky mouthfeel to the sauce.
Sugar
Balances the tartness of the gooseberries and rounds out the flavour.

The step that matters

Stew the gooseberries until tender, but not overdone. Gooseberries contain a lot of pectin, so overcooking breaks them down into a thin, watery pulp, while undercooking leaves lumps that resist sieving and give a grainy texture.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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