Name: Wild Grape Preserves
Ingredients: grapes; 1 pound sugar per pint of liquid

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 ↓

Wild Grape Preserves

Ingredients

grapes
1 pound sugar per pint of liquid

Directions

Prepare the grapes

Pick over the grapes, wash, and drain them.
Put the grapes into a kettle and heat them through on the back of the stove.
Rub the heated grapes through a wire sieve to remove seeds and skins.

Make the preserve

For every pint of liquid, add 1 pound of sugar.
Boil the mixture for fifteen minutes and then seal.

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 pulp and juice that form the body and flavor of the preserve.
Sugar: Sweetens the preserve and helps it set and keep by binding water.

“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.