Skip to main content
Main

Cranberry Gruel

A warm, sweetened cranberry porridge made by cooking cranberries in a flour and water mixture.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

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 Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gruel

  1. Mix the flour with ¼ cup cold water.

  2. Stir the mixture into 1 cup boiling salted water.

  3. Cook over direct heat for 15 minutes.

  4. Then cook over boiling water for 30 minutes.

Add fruit and serve

  1. Add the cranberries and cook for 10 minutes until soft.

  2. Add the sugar and stir until dissolved.

  3. Press through a strainer and serve.

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).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the water into a smooth, starchy gruel as it cooks.
Cranberries
Provide the fruit flavour and tartness, softening as they cook.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart cranberries and balances their acidity.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour mixture into boiling water. Flour added to hot liquid without first being smoothed in cold water clumps into lumps that stay in the gruel. Mixing it with cold water first lets the starch disperse evenly before it thickens.

“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

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes