Name: Cranberry Tart
Ingredients: 1 quart cranberries (Swedish, American, or Russian); ½ lemon (juice only); ¼ pound moist or powdered loaf sugar; Puff pastry or tart paste (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 Tart

Ingredients

1 quart cranberries (Swedish, American, or Russian)
½ lemon (juice only)
¼ pound moist or powdered loaf sugar
Puff pastry or tart paste (for covering)

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Pick and wash the cranberries in several waters.
Place the cranberries in a bowl with the lemon juice and sugar.

Bake and serve

Cover with puff pastry or tart paste.
Bake at 400°F (200°C) for 45 minutes.
If using tart paste, remove from the oven 5 minutes before done.
Ice the tart.
Return the tart to the oven.
Serve 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's main fruit flavour and tartness, which the sugar balances.
Sugar: Sweetens the cranberries and balances their sourness.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the cranberry flavour.

“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.