Name: Cranberry Filling
Ingredients: 1 quart cranberries; sufficient water; sugar to taste; cream for serving

Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Cranberry Filling

Ingredients

1 quart cranberries
sufficient water
sugar to taste
cream for serving

Directions

Prepare

Pick the cranberries.
Wash the cranberries carefully.
Cook the cranberries in enough water to cover them for 5 minutes in a granite or earthen vessel.
Pour off the water.
Add the same quantity of boiling water.
Cook for 2 to 3 hours.

Finish and serve

Mash through a colander.
Add sugar to taste.
Simmer on the back of the range for 20 minutes.
Spread the filling between layers and on top.
Serve with 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.

Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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 base that cooks down into the filling's body and flavor.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart cranberries and balances their acidity.

“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.