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Cranberry Gruel

A warm cranberry gruel made by cooking cranberries in a flour and water mixture.

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

Prepare

  1. Blend flour with cold water.

  2. Pick over and wash cranberries.

Cook the gruel

  1. Add the mixture to boiling salted water.

  2. Cook over boiling water for 30 minutes.

  3. Add cranberries to the flour mixture.

  4. Cook until very soft.

  5. Add sugar.

  6. Press the gruel through a sieve.

  7. Reheat the gruel.

  8. 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

Cranberries
Cook down to soft pulp, providing the main body, tartness and colour of the gruel.
Flour
Blended with cold water first, then thickens the gruel as it cooks in the liquid.
Sugar
Added at the end to sweeten the tart cranberries.

The step that matters

Cook until very soft. Cranberries must break down fully so the gruel can be pressed through a sieve smoothly. Under-cooked berries keep their skins and leave a grainy, uneven texture.

“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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