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Grapes

A method of making Muscatel grape brandy by crushing grapes, mixing with brandy and sugar, and filtering.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and brandy work together. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 711 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Grapes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the grapes

  1. Choose grapes before they are perfectly ripe.

  2. Wash and prick each large grape.

Make the brandy mixture

  1. Crush the smaller grapes and mix the juice with three times its weight of brandy.

  2. Press the smaller grapes and mix the juice with three and a half times its weight of brandy after dissolving 250 to 300 grams of sugar per liter in it.

  3. Filter the juice and use it to cover the choice grapes.

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. Grape + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together711 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Brandy and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Muscatel grapes
Provide the fruit and juice that flavour the brandy.
Brandy
Acts as the preserving base that extracts and holds the grape flavour.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps draw flavour from the grapes into the liquid.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (brandy, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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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