Name: Grape Fruit
Ingredients: 1 medium grape fruit; Maraschino cherries; 1 tablespoon Maraschino wine; sugar to taste

Why it works: Grape and wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 819 recipes. Both carry 1-p-menthene-8-thiol, which smells grapefruit. The science ↓

Grape Fruit

Ingredients

1 medium grape fruit
Maraschino cherries
1 tablespoon Maraschino wine
sugar to taste

Directions

Cut the grapefruit in half and remove the pulp and juice.
Sweeten the pulp and juice to taste.
Return the sweetened pulp and juice to the half shells.
Add 3 Maraschino cherries and 1 tablespoon of Maraschino wine.
Serve very cold.

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 + winetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together819 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-p-menthene-8-thiol (grapefruit).
Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,490 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Wine + sugartop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together9,581 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

Grapefruit (in the method): Provides the juicy pulp and juice that form the dish's base and its tart acidity.
Sugar: Sweetens the tart grapefruit juice and pulp to balance its acidity.
Maraschino wine: Adds a sweet, cherry-like aroma that complements the grapefruit.