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Cranberry Frappe

A chilled cranberry beverage made by boiling cranberries, straining, sweetening, adding lemon juice, and freezing with ice and salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Cranberry Frappe

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cranberry base

  1. Boil cranberries and water for 5-6 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture through a coarse cheesecloth.

  3. Add sugar and stir until dissolved.

  4. Once cold, add the strained lemon juice.

Freeze and serve

  1. Freeze the mixture to a mush using equal parts ice and salt.

  2. Serve in glass cups, ideally with turkey.

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 flavour and bright red colour that define the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the frappe slushy rather than solid.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens and balances the sweetness of the sugar.

The step that matters

Freezing to a mush. The ice and salt mixture must be cold enough to freeze the liquid, but the mixture should stay slushy. Freezing it solid makes it hard to serve, so check it while it is still soft.

“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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