Name: Grape Butter
Ingredients: ½ pound sugar; 1 pound grapes

Why it works: Sugar and grape 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 Butter

Ingredients

½ pound sugar
1 pound grapes

Directions

Boil the grape pulps until soft.
Squeeze the boiled pulps through a colander to separate the juice.
Add the skins to the juice.
Stir in the sugar.
Boil the mixture.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Sugar + grapetop 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 pulp, juice and skins that form the body and flavour of the butter.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and, as it dissolves and thickens with boiling, helps give the butter its spreadable body.

“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.