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Grape Soup

A sweet soup made from Concord grape juice, sugar, raisins, cinnamon, and thickened with flour.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and flour match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,075 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Grape Soup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Stem, wash, and cook enough Concord grapes to secure 1 quart of rich grape juice.

Simmer

  1. Add sugar, soaked raisins, and cinnamon sticks.

  2. Boil for 30 minutes, then remove the cinnamon sticks.

  3. Thicken the mixture with flour.

Serve

  1. Serve hot or 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.

  1. Raisin + flourtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,075 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Raisin + cinnamontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,390 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Cinnamon + flourtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Grape + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,164 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  5. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Concord grape juice
Forms the liquid base and provides the main grape flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the grape juice.
Seedless raisins
Add soft chew and concentrated sweetness as they simmer in the juice.
Cinnamon sticks
Infuse warm aroma into the soup while it boils.
Flour
Its starch swells when heated in liquid, thickening the soup.

The step that matters

Thicken the mixture with flour.. Flour starch thickens only when heated in liquid, and it clumps if dropped in dry. Mixing it smoothly into a little cool liquid first, then stirring it into the simmering soup, gives an even, silky body.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, raisin, cinnamon, flour. 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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