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Dessert

Cranberry Pie

A pie with a crust of flour, lard, and baking powder, filled with cranberries and sugar, topped with meringue.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Cranberry Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare the crust

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. In a bowl, mix flour, lard, baking powder, salt, and enough cold water to form a stiff dough.

  3. Roll out the dough.

  4. Line a pie plate with the rolled dough.

Make the filling

  1. Cook the cranberries until tender.

  2. Strain the cooked cranberries.

  3. Mix the strained cranberries with sugar and a little salt.

  4. Pour the cranberry mixture into the prepared pie crust.

  5. Bake the pie until the crust is golden.

Top with meringue

  1. In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Gradually add fine sugar to the beaten egg whites.

  3. Spread the meringue over the baked pie.

  4. Return the pie to the oven to brown the meringue.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Flour + eggtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together106,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

Flour and egg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 106,462 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the crust when mixed with water.
Lard
Adds fat that makes the crust tender and flaky.
Cranberries
Provide the tart fruit flavor and body of the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart cranberries and helps set the filling.
Egg whites
Whipped into a foam that forms the structure of the meringue.

The step that matters

Beating the egg whites until stiff. Egg whites must be whipped to stiff peaks before sugar is added, since trapped air forms the foam that gives meringue its volume. Under-whipped whites will weep and collapse, and fat or yolk left in the bowl will prevent them from whipping properly.

“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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