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Dessert

Compote of Cranberries

A compote made from cranberries, sugar, lemon juice, and optional cochineal, served with its own syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and lemon 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 ↓

Compote of Cranberries

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Drain the cranberries in a sieve.

  2. Boil the cranberry juice with sugar, cochineal, and lemon juice.

  3. Serve the compote with its own syrup.

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. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon 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 base and the juice that becomes the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the tart cranberries and thickens the juice into a syrup as it boils.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Boil the cranberry juice with sugar, cochineal, and lemon juice. Cranberries contain pectin, and the sugar and acid help it set into a syrup. Boiling too long can break the berries down or make the syrup overly thick, so watch the texture closely.

“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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