Name: Green Grape Jelly
Ingredients: Catawba grapes; 1 pound loaf sugar for each pint of juice

Why it works: Grape and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,490 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Green Grape Jelly

Ingredients

Catawba grapes
1 pound loaf sugar for each pint of juice

Directions

Prepare the grapes

Gather Catawba grapes before they ripen.
Remove grapes from the stem and wash them.
Place grapes in a stone jar and set the jar in a kettle of cold water over high heat.
Once the juice is extracted, remove the kettle from heat and strain the grapes.

Make the jelly

For each pint of juice, add 1 pound of loaf sugar.
Boil the mixture for 20 minutes.

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.

Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,490 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Catawba grapes: Provide the juice, which carries the flavour and natural pectin that set the jelly.
Loaf sugar: Sweetens the jelly and helps it set into a firm, spreadable gel.

“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.