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Drink

Cranberry Frappe

A frozen cranberry beverage made by boiling cranberries, adding sugar, lemon juice, and freezing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 Frappe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the base

  1. Boil cranberries in water for 10 minutes.

  2. Strain through a coarse cheesecloth.

  3. Add sugar and stir until dissolved.

  4. When cold, add lemon juice.

Freeze and serve

  1. Freeze to a mush and pack as usual.

  2. Serve in sherbet cups with roast turkey.

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 + 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 flavour and pink colour that the whole frappe is built on.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and softens the frozen texture by lowering its freezing point.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sugar.

The step that matters

Freeze to a mush. Sugar and acid lower the freezing point, so the mixture stays partly liquid and forms fine ice crystals. Freezing it solid makes it hard and icy, so it should be checked and stirred as it firms to a soft mush.

“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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