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Drink

Grape Juice

A sweetened juice made from Concord grapes, boiled with sugar and optionally lemon, served chilled with shaved 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 ↓

Grape Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the grapes

  1. Pick Concord grapes from the stem.

  2. Wash the grapes.

  3. Heat the grapes, stirring constantly until they break.

Extract and sweeten the juice

  1. Pour the mixture into a jelly bag.

  2. Press the mixture slightly.

  3. Add sugar.

  4. Cook the juice and sugar until boiling.

Bottle and serve

  1. Pour into a hot bottle.

  2. Cork the bottle.

  3. Seal with paraffin or a mixture of shoemaker's wax and resin.

  4. Serve with shaved ice.

  5. Add a few drops of lemon juice if desired.

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 juice and flavor that make up the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the grape juice.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (grape, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against grape, 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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