Name: Fruit Compote Salad
Ingredients: 1 slice of pineapple; 1 section of orange; 1 section of grapefruit; lettuce; Denver salad dressing; chopped nuts

Why it works: Grapefruit and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Fruit Compote Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Place a slice of pineapple on a bed of lettuce.
Add a section of orange and a section of grapefruit on top.
Drizzle with Denver salad dressing.
Sprinkle chopped nuts over the top.

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.

Grapefruit + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together118 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Orange + grapefruittop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together233 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,664 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Pineapple + grapefruittop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together95 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Pineapple + lettucetop 10% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together271 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple: Adds sweetness and juiciness to the salad.
Orange: Adds sweet, bright citrus flavour and juice.
Grapefruit: Adds tart, slightly bitter citrus flavour and juice.
Lettuce: Forms a crisp, cool base for the fruit.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pineapple, orange, grapefruit, lettuce):

Walnutfits better
Almondfits better
Beansfits better
Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, orange, grapefruit, lettuce. 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.