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Baked Gooseberry Pudding

A baked pudding made from gooseberry juice, eggs, butter, sugar, and biscuit crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Baked Gooseberry Pudding

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

  1. Stew gooseberries in a jar over a hot hearth or in a saucepan of water until they pulp.

  2. Press the pulp through a coarse sieve to obtain 1 pint of juice.

  3. Beat and strain the yolks and whites of 3 eggs.

Make the pudding

  1. Mix the gooseberry juice, eggs, and butter together, then sweeten to taste.

  2. Add crumbs of rolls or Naples biscuits for consistency.

  3. Put a crust around the dish and pour the mixture into it.

  4. Bake until set.

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.

  1. Gooseberry + biscuittop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together12 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,009 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  3. Sugar + biscuittop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. 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
Set the custard-like pudding and bind it together as it bakes.
Butter
Adds richness and a softer, smoother texture to the pudding.
Gooseberry juice
Provides the main tart flavour and most of the liquid in the pudding.
Crumbs of rolls or naples biscuits
Thicken the mixture and give it body.

The step that matters

Bake until set. Egg proteins coagulate as they heat, so the pudding firms into a sliceable custard. Underbaked, it stays loose; overbaked, the eggs can curdle and turn watery.

Swap the gooseberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (egg, butter, sugar, biscuit):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Gooseberrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against egg, butter, sugar, biscuit. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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