Why it works: Lemon and sugar 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 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
Pick and wash the cranberries in several waters.
Combine cranberries with lemon juice and sugar in a dish.
Bake and serve
Cover with puff pastry or short crust.
Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 45 minutes.
If using short crust, remove from oven 5 minutes before done, ice it, then return to oven until finished.
Serve cold.
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.
-
Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together53,532 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Lemon and sugar 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 fruit filling that the sugar sweetens and the pastry encloses.
- Moist sugar or loaf sugar
- Sweetens the tart cranberries and helps balance their sourness.
- Lemon juice
- Adds acidity that brightens the cranberry flavor.
- Puff pastry or short crust
- Forms the crust that encloses the filling and browns in the oven.
The step that matters
Remove the short crust 5 minutes early to ice it. Icing the short crust before it finishes baking lets the glaze set on the surface as the crust completes browning. Timing this step matters because the crust can over-brown or dry out if left in the oven too long.
“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.
You might also like
Lemon Cake228 recipes
Lemon Ice147 recipes
Lemon Sherbet103 recipes
Lemon Custard64 recipesThe free Flavor Lab newsletter: one surprising pairing a week and the molecular reason it works, in 60 seconds. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Prefer an account? Create a free account to save pairings and unlock the full chemistry.