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Drink

Unfermented Grape Juice

A sweetened grape juice made by cooking, mashing, and straining Concord grapes, then adding sugar and boiling briefly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
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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 ↓

Unfermented Grape Juice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the grapes

  1. Pick grapes from the stems and wash them clean.

  2. Cook the grapes until soft, then mash with a potato masher.

  3. Strain the mixture through a colander, then through a cloth or jelly bag.

Sweeten and bottle

  1. Measure the juice and add ½ pound of sugar for every quart of juice.

  2. Boil the juice and sugar together briefly to preserve the flavor.

  3. Bottle and seal the juice for use next summer.

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 + 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, which is the base of the drink and carries its flavor.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the grape juice.

The step that matters

Boil the juice and sugar together briefly. Brief boiling heats the juice enough to reduce microbes that could ferment it, while a long boil would cook off fresh grape flavor. Sealing the bottles keeps the juice from spoiling.

“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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