Why it works: Sugar and cranberry work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 374 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Cranberry Jelly
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare cranberry juice according to general directions.
Add 1 pound of sugar to every pint of cranberry juice.
Boil the mixture and skim off any foam.
Test the jelly by dropping a little into cold water; if it does not mingle, it is done.
Rinse glasses in cold water before pouring in the jelly to prevent sticking.
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.
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Sugar + cranberrytop 25% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together374 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Sugar
- Sweetens the jelly and helps it set when boiled with the juice.
- Cranberry juice
- Provides the main liquid, tartness and flavour, and the fruit pectin that gels the jelly.
The step that matters
Testing for doneness. Jelly that is not boiled long enough stays runny, while overcooking makes it stiff. A cold-water drop test shows whether the mixture has reached the gelling point, so the cook can stop the boil at the right time.
“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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