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Dessert

Cranberry Pie

A fruit pie made with cranberries, raisins, sugar, flour, water, and vanilla.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cranberry Pie

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Mix flour and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Gradually pour hot water over the mixture, stirring until smooth.

  3. Add the coarsely chopped cranberries and raisins, and cook for a few minutes.

  4. Partly cool the mixture, then add vanilla.

Assemble

  1. Fill a prepared one-crust pie shell with the mixture.

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. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together35,032 recipes

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

  3. Raisin + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together782 recipes

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

  4. Flour + vanillatop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19,241 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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 flavor and bulk of the filling.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and helps thicken it as it dissolves in hot water.
Flour
Thickens the hot liquid so the filling sets rather than running.
Raisins
Add chewy texture and extra sweetness to the filling.

The step that matters

Adding the hot water to the flour and sugar. Pouring the water in gradually while stirring keeps flour from clumping into lumps, so the mixture becomes smooth before it is cooked and thickened.

“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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