Name: Cranberry Pik
Ingredients: 1 quart cranberries; ½ lemon (juiced); ¼ pound moist sugar or pounded loaf sugar; puff paste or short crust for covering

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 Pik

Ingredients

1 quart cranberries
½ lemon (juiced)
¼ pound moist sugar or pounded loaf sugar
puff paste or short crust for covering

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.

Prepare the filling

Pick and wash the cranberries in several waters.
Combine the cranberries with lemon juice and sugar in a dish.

Cover and bake

Cover with puff pastry or short crust.
Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 minutes.
If using short crust, remove from the oven 5 minutes before done, ice it, then return to the oven until cold.

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.

Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked 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 flavour and the bulk of the filling.
Sugar: Sweetens the filling and balances the cranberries' tartness.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the filling.
Puff pastry or short crust: Forms the covering, giving a crisp, browned top over the fruit.

“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.