Skip to main content
Drink

Compound Cranberry Water

A beverage made by boiling oatmeal with water, adding mashed cranberries, sweetening, and optionally wine or brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and white wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,832 recipes. Both carry myrcene, which smells balsamic, herbaceous. The science ↓

Compound Cranberry Water

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Boil the oatmeal in 1 quart of water until smooth.

  2. Mash the cranberries in a small amount of cold water.

  3. Add the mashed cranberries to the oatmeal mixture, ensuring it remains thin.

  4. Sweeten to taste and stir in the optional wine or brandy if desired.

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. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  2. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + white winetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,586 recipes

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

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

Oatmeal
Thickens the water slightly and gives the drink a soft, cloudy body.
Cranberries
Provide the tart fruit flavour and red colour.

The step that matters

Keep the mixture thin when adding the cranberries. Oatmeal thickens as it cools and starches set, so adding too much cranberry pulp or letting it cook down can make the drink gluey rather than a light, pourable water.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, white wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, white wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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 WineLemon Wine31 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes