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
Combine
Combine 1 pound of sugar with 1 pint of cranberry juice in a pot.
Cook and test
Boil the mixture and skim off any foam that forms.
To test for doneness, drop a small amount into cold water; if it does not mix with the water, it is ready.
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
- Provides sweetness and, at high concentration, helps the juice set into a firm jelly.
- Cranberry juice
- Forms the liquid base and supplies the tart flavor of the jelly.
The step that matters
Testing for doneness. The jelly sets only once enough water has boiled off and the sugar concentration is high enough. The cold-water test checks this: a drop that stays together instead of dissolving shows the mixture has reached the setting point. Stopping too early leaves the jelly runny.
“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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