Name: A Good Summer Drink
Ingredients: 2 pounds ripe Catawba grapes; 3 tablespoons white sugar; 1 cup water; ice

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 ↓

A Good Summer Drink

Ingredients

2 pounds ripe Catawba grapes
3 tablespoons white sugar
1 cup water
ice

Directions

Prepare

Remove grapes from the stem and squeeze them in a coarse cloth to extract the juice.
Dissolve the sugar in the grape juice.
Add water to the mixture and chill it with ice.

Serve

Place a lump of ice in a pitcher, pour the mixture over it, and serve.
Adjust sweetness with more sugar if needed.

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

Catawba grapes: Provide the juice that gives the drink its flavor and natural fruit sweetness.
White sugar: Adds sweetness and rounds out the tart flavor of the grape juice.

“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.