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Cranberry Gruel

A thickened cranberry porridge cooked with water, salt, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Cranberry Gruel

Ingredients

Directions

Make the gruel

  1. Mix flour and cold water to a smooth paste.

  2. Stir the paste into the boiling salted water.

  3. Cook over boiling water for 45 minutes.

Add the cranberries and finish

  1. Pick over and wash cranberries, then add them to the gruel.

  2. Cook until cranberries are soft.

  3. Add sugar and stir until dissolved.

  4. Press through a strainer and serve.

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. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Flour
Thickens the gruel as it cooks, giving it a smooth, body-filled texture.
Cranberries
Provide the tart fruit flavour and colour that the gruel is built around.
Sugar
Sweetens the gruel and balances the tartness of the cranberries.

The step that matters

Stir the flour paste into the boiling water. Flour clumps if it hits hot liquid unmixed. Mixing it smooth with cold water first lets the starch disperse evenly, so the gruel thickens without lumps.

“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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