Name: Grape Juice
Ingredients: 4 cups Concord grapes; 1 cup cold water; ½ cup sugar

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 ↓

Grape Juice

Ingredients

4 cups Concord grapes
1 cup cold water
½ cup sugar

Directions

Prepare

Wash and pick over the grapes, removing stems.

Cook

Add water and cook in a double boiler for 1½ hours.
Add sugar and cook for an additional 20 minutes.

Strain and cool

Strain the mixture and cool.

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

Concord grapes: Supply the juice, along with most of the deep color and grape flavor.
Sugar: Adds sweetness that balances the grapes' natural tartness.

“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.