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Dessert

Red Grape Ice

A chilled dessert made from red grapes, sugar, water, citrus, and whipped egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Red Grape Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Select a quarter of the grapes to add whole at the end.

  2. Scald the remaining grapes in a syrup made of sugar and part of the water.

  3. Rub the pulp through a strainer with the syrup and pour over the skins.

  4. Add the juice of the lemon and the remaining water, then freeze as usual.

Finish and serve

  1. For serving, whip the egg whites until firm and beat into the ice until smooth and foamy.

  2. Cut the orange into strips without peeling and add to the ice along with the reserved grapes before freezing until firm.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Grape + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Grape + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,412 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Red tokay grapes
Provide the main fruit flavour and the bulk of the ice's body.
Sugar
Sweetens the ice and lowers its freezing point so it stays softer.
Egg whites
Whipped to add air and a light, foamy texture to the frozen ice.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet grape flavour.

The step that matters

Beat the whipped egg whites into the ice. Egg whites must be whipped until firm so they trap air; if they are deflated or overmixed, the ice loses its light, foamy texture. Beating them in gently keeps the air intact.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, lemon, orange, egg):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon, orange, egg. 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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