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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A chilled fruit salad with banana, orange, pineapple, Malaga grapes, candied cherries, and a sherry-Madeira dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 733 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut the banana, orange, and pineapple into squares.

  2. Combine the cut fruits with the Malaga grapes and whole candied cherries.

Make the dressing

  1. In a bowl, mix the sugar, sherry wine, Madeira wine, and cinnamon to create the dressing.

Assemble and serve

  1. Serve the fruit mixture on lettuce leaves.

  2. Drizzle the dressing over the fruit salad.

  3. Serve ice cold.

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. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Pineapple + grapetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Banana + grapetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps draw out juice from the fruit into the dressing.
Sherry wine
Adds aromatic depth and acidity that brightens the sweet fruit.
Madeira wine
Adds a rich, aromatic sweetness to the dressing.

Swap the lettuce

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (banana, orange, pineapple, grape, sugar, sherry, wine):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Tomatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, orange, pineapple, grape, sugar, sherry, wine. 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.

More fruit salad recipes

Dressing 41Ambrosia 24Pineapple 21Grape 15Frozen 10Mixed 8 See all 267 →

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