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Dessert

Cranberry Tapioca

A sweet dessert made by boiling cranberry juice, orange juice, tapioca, and sugar, served warm or chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cranberry and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 230 recipes. Both carry ethyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

Cranberry Tapioca

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a pot, combine cranberry juice, orange juice, tapioca, and sugar.

  2. Boil gently for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally.

  3. Serve warm or chilled with nut cream.

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. Cranberry + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together230 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

  3. Cranberry + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together374 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Tapioca
Thickens the juice as it cooks, giving the pudding its gel-like, slightly chewy body.
Cranberry juice
Provides the main liquid and the tart fruit flavour that the pudding is built on.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart juice and balances its acidity.

The step that matters

Boil gently for 15 minutes. Tapioca must cook long enough for its starch granules to swell and turn translucent; stirring prevents scorching on the bottom of the pot.

Swap the cranberry

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Cranberrythe original
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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