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Rolled Oats with Cranberry Sauce

A simple dish of rolled oats cooked with water, salt, butter, and lemon juice, served with cranberry sauce or jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and cranberry work together. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 210 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Rolled Oats with Cranberry Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Cook the oats

  1. Boil the rolled oats with water and salt for 20 minutes.

  2. Cover the oats.

  3. Cook in the oven at 350°F (175°C) or on the stove for about 40 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove from heat, add butter and lemon juice.

  2. Serve on soup plates and pour cranberry sauce or jam over the oats.

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 + cranberrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together210 recipes

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

  2. Oats + cranberrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together36 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans,trans-2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Oats + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Butter + cranberrytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together291 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-decenal (waxy, orange).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rolled oats
Provide the bulk of the dish, absorbing water and swelling into a thick, porridge-like texture.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, giving the cooked oats a smoother, silkier mouthfeel.
Lemon juice
Adds a little acidity that brightens the flavour of the mild oats and sweet topping.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (oats, butter, cranberry):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Blueberryfits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against oats, butter, cranberry. 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.

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