Name: Cranberry Pie
Ingredients: 1 quart cranberries; ½ lemon (juice); ¼ pound moist sugar or pounded loaf sugar; puff pastry or short crust

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

1 quart cranberries
½ lemon (juice)
¼ pound moist sugar or pounded loaf sugar
puff pastry or short crust

Directions

Prepare

Pick and wash the cranberries in several waters.
Combine cranberries with the juice of half a lemon and sugar in a dish.
Cover with puff pastry or short crust.

Bake and finish

Bake 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 fruit filling that forms the body of the pie.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart cranberries and helps soften them as they bake.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the cranberries.
Puff pastry or short crust: Forms the crust that encloses and bakes over the fruit filling.

“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.