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Dessert

Cranberry Ice

A chilled dessert made by cooking cranberries with water, sugar, and lemon juice, then freezing the mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Cranberry Ice

Why it works: Sugar and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Cranberry Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Cook cranberries with water until tender.

  2. Strain the mixture and add sugar.

  3. Cook until the sugar is dissolved.

Finish and freeze

  1. Cool the mixture, then stir in lemon juice.

  2. Freeze just long enough to form an ice.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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 fruit flavour and the bulk of the ice's colour and body.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice soft rather than rock hard.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the cranberry flavour and sharpens its tartness.

The step that matters

Freeze just long enough to form an ice. Sugar and acid lower the freezing point, so the mixture stays slushy and then hardens slowly. Freezing too long makes it solid and icy. Check it early and stop once it has formed a loose, scoopable ice.

“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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