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Dessert

Cranberry Pies

A fruit pie made with cranberries, sugar, nutmeg, and a double crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and nutmeg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Cranberry Pies

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the filling

  1. Stew the cranberries in a pot until soft.

  2. Sweeten the cranberries with sugar to your taste.

  3. Add nutmeg and mix well.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the mixture into a pie dish lined with the bottom crust.

  2. Cut the additional crust into strips and lay them on top to form a diamond pattern.

  3. Bake in a 350°F (175°C) oven until the crust is golden.

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 + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

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

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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

Cranberries
Provide the tart base of the filling, which softens into a thick sauce when stewed.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the cranberries' tartness.
Nutmeg
Adds a warm, aromatic spice note to the filling.
Pie crust
Forms the structure that holds the filling and the top crust together.

“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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