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Dessert

Green Gooseberry Tart

A tart filled with stewed gooseberries, sugar, and pastry, baked briefly and served cold.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Green Gooseberry Tart

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Make the filling

  1. Place the gooseberries in a porcelain kettle with enough water to prevent burning.

  2. Stew slowly until the gooseberries break down.

  3. Remove from heat and sweeten with sugar.

  4. Let cool.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the cooled mixture into the pastry shell.

  2. Cover with the puff pastry top crust.

  3. Brush with beaten egg.

  4. Bake at 400°F (200°C) for three minutes to glaze.

Serve

  1. Serve cold.

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 + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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 that breaks down into the filling and gives its main flavour.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart fruit, balancing the gooseberries' natural acidity.
Puff pastry
Forms a flaky, golden top crust that bakes to a crisp finish.
Beaten egg
Gives the top crust a glossy, browned surface when brushed on before baking.

The step that matters

Let the filling cool before pouring it into the shell. A hot filling softens the pastry base and melts the puff pastry's layers, so the crust turns soggy and loses its flakiness.

“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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