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Grape Game Sauce

A sweet and spicy grape sauce made with grapes, sugar, vinegar, and spices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Grape Game Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the grapes

  1. Wash the grapes and remove them from the stems.

  2. In a pot, combine the grapes and water, then stew slowly.

  3. Press the mixture through a colander to separate the pulp.

Make the sauce

  1. Return the pulp to the pot and add sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, salt, and cayenne.

  2. Boil the mixture slowly for one hour, stirring often.

Jar

  1. Pour the sauce into pint-sized self-sealing jars and seal as you would canned fruit.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Ginger + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,800 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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

What each ingredient does

Grapes
Provide the fruit pulp that forms the body and flavor base of the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the sauce as it cooks down.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness and sharpness of the grapes.

The step that matters

Boil the mixture slowly for one hour, stirring often. Sugar-rich mixtures can scorch on the bottom of the pot, and stirring keeps heat even. Slow boiling lets water evaporate so the sauce thickens gradually.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, ginger, pepper):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, cinnamon, clove, ginger, pepper. 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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