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Cranberry Gruel

A simple gruel made with cranberries, flour, 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

Prepare

  1. Blend flour with cold water.

  2. Add to boiling salted water.

Cook

  1. Cook over boiling water for 30 minutes.

  2. Pick over and wash cranberries, then add to flour mixture; cook until very soft.

Finish and serve

  1. Add sugar, press gruel through a sieve.

  2. Reheat 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 liquid into a gruel by swelling its starch as it cooks.
Cranberries
Provide the main flavor and tartness, and their pectin helps the gruel set as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the tartness of the cranberries.

The step that matters

Blend the flour with cold water first. Starch granules disperse evenly in cold liquid, so they hydrate without clumping. Adding dry flour directly to boiling water tends to form lumps that are hard to smooth out.

“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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