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Dessert

Grape Sauce

A thickened grape juice sauce sweetened to taste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and corn work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 333 recipes. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Grape Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Heat grape juice in a saucepan until boiling.

  2. Mix corn starch with a small amount of cold water until smooth.

  3. Add the corn starch mixture to the boiling juice.

  4. If the juice is thick, dilute with water.

  5. Cook until thickened, then sweeten if desired.

  6. Strain to remove lumps and serve hot.

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 + corntop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together333 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Corn + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,168 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).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Grape juice
Provides the main liquid, flavour and natural sweetness of the sauce.
Corn starch
Thickens the juice as it heats, giving the sauce body.

The step that matters

Adding the corn starch mixture to the boiling juice. Cornstarch must be fully smooth before it goes in, and the juice must be boiling. Starch granules swell and thicken on heating; adding lumpy or unmixed starch causes clumps that are hard to remove.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Coconutfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, sugar. 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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