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Cranberry Gruel

A simple gruel made with flour, water, cranberries, 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.

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

  5. Cook until cranberries are soft.

Finish and serve

  1. Add sugar and stir until dissolved.

  2. 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
Its starch thickens the boiling liquid into a smooth, body-rich gruel.
Cranberries
They add tart flavour and colour as they soften into the gruel.
Sugar
It adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the cranberries.

The step that matters

Stirring the flour paste into the boiling water. Flour starch must be fully dispersed in the paste before it meets the hot liquid. Starch granules that hit hot liquid unblended swell on contact and form lumps that a strainer may not fully remove.

“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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