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Dessert

Cranberry Sauce

A fruit sauce made from cranberries, apples, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cranberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the fruit

  1. Peel and core the apples, then cook them in 1 pint of water until tender.

  2. Add the cranberries to the cooked apples and boil until the berries burst.

Sweeten and finish

  1. Stir in 2 cups of sugar and boil for 10 minutes.

  2. Mash the mixture through a colander or coarse sieve.

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. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 flavor and pectin that helps the sauce thicken and set.
Tart apples
Add natural pectin and body, helping the sauce hold together without extra thickener.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce, balancing its tartness, and helps it set as water evaporates.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce after adding the sugar. Boiling for the full 10 minutes evaporates water and concentrates the pectin, sugar and acid so the sauce thickens. Stopping early leaves it loose.

“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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