Name: Grape Juice
Ingredients: 2 quarts grapes; 1 pint water; Sugar (optional)

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

2 quarts grapes
1 pint water
Sugar (optional)

Directions

Extract the juice

Remove grapes from stems and place them in a clean saucepan.
Add 1 pint of water for every 2 quarts of grapes.
Cover and heat slowly until boiling.
Once boiling, pour the mixture into a heavy bag to drain.
When cool, press out the remaining juice.
Combine all the juice or keep the pressed juice separate.

Heat and store

Heat the juice to boiling.
Skim off any foam.
Store in fruit jars like canned fruit.
Add sugar if desired, but it is preferable to omit it.

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

Grapes: Provide the fruit flavour, natural sugars and juice that makes up the drink.
Water: Helps the grapes soften and heat evenly so the juice releases more easily.

“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.