Why it works: Cranberry and sugar work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Cranberry Jelly
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the cranberry juice as per general directions.
Add 1 pound of sugar to every pint of juice.
Boil the mixture and skim off any foam.
Test the jelly by dropping a little into cold water; it is done when it does not mingle with the water.
Rinse glasses in cold water before pouring in the jelly to prevent sticking.
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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Cranberry + sugartop 25% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together374 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Cranberry juice
- Provides the liquid and the fruit flavour that the jelly is built on.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the jelly and helps it set when boiled with the juice.
The step that matters
Testing for set. Jelly keeps thickening as it cools, so judging by appearance while hot can lead to a runny result. The cold-water test shows whether the mixture has reached the concentration needed to gel.
“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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