Skip to main content
Drink

Grape Water Ice

A frozen beverage made from lemon juice, orange zest, water, clarified sugar, grape syrup, and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Grape Water Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Combine the lemon juice, orange zest, water, clarified sugar, grape syrup, and sherry in a bowl.

  2. Strain the mixture to remove any solids.

Freeze

  1. Pour the strained mixture into an ice cream maker and freeze according to the manufacturer's instructions.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + grapetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  3. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  4. Grape + sherrytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together229 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Orange + sherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together823 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and balances the sweetness.
Clarified sugar
Adds sweetness and lowers the freezing point, keeping the ice softer.
Grape syrup
Adds sweetness, grape flavour and colour.
Sherry
Adds depth of flavour and alcohol, which lowers the freezing point and softens the texture.
Orange zest
Adds aroma from the citrus oils in the peel.

The step that matters

Freezing the mixture. Sugar and alcohol both lower the freezing point, so the mixture stays slushy and can take longer to set. Freezing it fully in the ice cream maker, as the manufacturer directs, gives a smooth texture rather than a loose or icy one.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, orange, sugar, syrup, sherry):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, orange, sugar, syrup, sherry. 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.

You might also like

Orange SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesLemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesOrange Water IceOrange Water Ice28 recipes