Why it works: Lemon and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Cranberry Pie
Ingredients
Directions
The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.
Prepare
Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).
In a dish, combine the cranberries, lemon juice, and sugar.
Cover the mixture with puff pastry or short crust.
Bake and serve
Bake for 45 minutes.
If using short crust, remove it from the oven 5 minutes before it’s done, ice it, then return it to the oven until finished.
Serve the pie cold.
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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Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together53,532 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
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
- Cranberries
- Provide the tart fruit filling that forms the body of the pie.
- Sugar
- Sweetens the tart cranberries and helps form a syrupy filling.
- Lemon juice
- Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the cranberries.
- Pastry
- Encloses the filling and browns in the oven as it bakes.
The step that matters
Covering and baking the short crust. Short crust can overbake or brown unevenly if left too long, so removing it early to ice it and returning it to finish baking helps it reach an even golden colour without burning.
“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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