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Dessert

Gooseberry Cream

A chilled gooseberry dessert made with boiled berries, sugar, whipped cream, brandy, and green food coloring.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Gooseberry Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Top and tail the gooseberries, then rinse them.

  2. Place the fruit in a china jar with water and sugar.

  3. Stew until the pulp can be passed through a fine sieve.

Finish and serve

  1. Add the whipped cream, brandy, and food coloring when cool.

  2. Chill the mixture in a pan of ice for 1 hour or in an ice cave for 30 minutes.

  3. Serve with rusks.

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 + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Cream + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,635 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  3. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Green gooseberries
Provide the tart fruit pulp that forms the base of the cream.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the stewed fruit and balances its tartness.
Whipped cream
Adds fat and air, giving the mixture a light, creamy texture.
Brandy
Adds aroma and flavor while contributing a little alcohol to the mixture.

The step that matters

Stew until the pulp can be passed through a fine sieve. The fruit must soften fully so the pulp passes smoothly through the sieve; unbroken pieces leave the cream grainy. Cooling before adding cream also keeps the whipped cream from deflating.

“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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