Skip to main content
Dessert

Grape Pickles

A sweet and sour pickled grape preserve made with grapes, sugar, vinegar, cloves, and allspice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Clove and allspice match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Grape Pickles

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove the skin from the grapes.

  2. Boil the grape pulp until tender and strain it.

Cook and serve

  1. Boil the skins in vinegar with the ground cloves and allspice for 2 hours.

  2. Add the pulp and brown sugar to the skins and let it boil slowly like jelly.

  3. Pour into bowls and glasses to cool.

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. Clove + allspicetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Grape + clovetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  3. Grape + allspicetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together753 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  4. Vinegar + allspicetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,548 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-methylbutyl acetate (fruit).

  5. Grape + vinegartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,589 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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 skins that form the body of the preserve.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and, as water evaporates, helps the mixture thicken and set like jelly.
Vinegar
Adds sharp acidity that balances the sweetness and helps preserve the mixture.
Ground cloves
Contribute warm, aromatic spice flavour that infuses the simmering skins.
Allspice
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavour that infuses the simmering skins.

The step that matters

Let the pulp and sugar boil slowly like jelly. Sugar and the fruit's natural pectin set as water evaporates, so the mixture needs a slow, steady simmer long enough to thicken. Boiling too hard can scorch the sugar, while stopping too early leaves it runny.

Swap the grape

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, vinegar, clove, allspice):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, vinegar, clove, allspice. 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

Clove CakeClove Cake53 recipesGrape SherbetGrape Sherbet32 recipesGrapefruit MarmaladeGrapefruit Marmalade16 recipesGrape ButterGrape Butter9 recipes