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 ↓
Fruit Puddings
Ingredients
Directions
Line and fill the basin
Butter a basin and line it with pastry, rolling it to ½ inch thick.
Place half the gooseberries at the bottom of the basin.
Sprinkle half the sugar over the gooseberries.
Add the remaining gooseberries and top with the rest of the sugar.
Seal and boil
Draw the pastry to the center and seal the edges well.
Cover with a cloth and tie it at the bottom.
Boil in plenty of water for 1 hour.
Serve
Remove from the saucepan, untie the cloth, and turn out onto a dish or leave in the basin.
Serve with sugar sprinkled on top.
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.
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Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked 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
- Form the tart fruit filling that gives the pudding its main flavor and bulk.
- Sugar
- Adds sweetness that balances the gooseberries' tartness and softens the fruit.
- Pastry
- Encloses the filling and holds its shape during the long boil.
The step that matters
Seal the edges well. A poor seal lets boiling water seep into the basin during the hour-long cook, diluting the fruit and making the pudding soggy.
“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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