Name: Grape Juice
Ingredients: 1 gallon grapes; 3 pints water; sugar to taste

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

1 gallon grapes
3 pints water
sugar to taste

Directions

Prepare

Remove grapes from stems and place in a pot.
Pour 3 pints of water over the grapes and bring to a boil.
Strain the mixture through a cloth.

Sweeten and bottle

Sweeten to taste, then return to heat and cook for 10 minutes.
Strain again and seal the juice in bottles.

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

Grapes: Provide the fruit flavour, colour and natural sweetness that make up the juice.
Water: Helps extract juice from the grapes during heating and loosens the mixture for straining.
Sugar: Adds sweetness to balance the tartness of the grape juice.

“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.