Name: Grape Juice
Ingredients: 8 baskets of New York Concord grapes; water; 1 cup of 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

8 baskets of New York Concord grapes
water
1 cup of sugar

Directions

Prepare the grapes

Pick over the grapes, using only sound ones, and strip them from the stems.
Put the grapes into a preserving kettle and barely cover with water.
Cook slowly, crushing the grapes until all are broken.

Strain and sweeten

Strain the mixture through a bag.
Add 1 cup of sugar to 1 quart of juice.
Boil for 4 minutes.

Bottle

Bottle and seal.

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: Provide the juice, along with the flavor and color that define the drink.
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.