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Unfermented Grape-juice

A homemade grape juice made by cooking grapes, straining, adding sugar, and serving over ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,412 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Unfermented Grape-juice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the juice

  1. Mash the grapes and cook them in 3 cups of water.

  2. Strain the mixture.

  3. Add the skins and seeds to 3 more cups of water. Cook the mixture again.

  4. Strain the mixture again.

  5. Add 2 cups of sugar to the strained juice. Boil the juice for 5 minutes.

  6. Skim the surface.

  7. Bottle the hot juice in air-tight jars.

Serve

  1. Add sugar to the juice for serving.

  2. Add a little lemon juice or thin slices of lemon to the juice.

  3. Fill glasses half full of cracked ice.

  4. Pour the grape juice into the glasses.

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

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

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

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

  3. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

Concord grapes
Provide the main flavor, color, and juice for the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the grape juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the grape juice.

The step that matters

Bottle the hot juice in air-tight jars. Juice must be kept hot and sealed so it stays free of spoilage microbes; otherwise it can ferment, since yeasts in the air can act on the sugars in the juice.

Swap the grape

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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