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Dessert

Prickly Pear

Fresh prickly pear slices dusted with powdered sugar and optionally topped with orange juice, served chilled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Prickly pear and orange work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3 recipes. Both carry ethyl octanoate, which smells fruity, wine. The science ↓

Prickly Pear

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut a slice off each end of the prickly pear.

  2. Peel the prickly pear and cut the pulp into slices.

Serve

  1. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and squeeze orange juice on top, if desired.

  2. Serve chilled for 1 to 2 hours before serving.

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. Prickly pear + orangetop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  2. Sugar + orangetop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Prickly pear + sugartop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and orange barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Prickly pear
Provides the main flesh, juicy texture and mild, sweet flavor of the dish.
Powdered sugar
Adds sweetness and dissolves quickly into the juices of the sliced fruit.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and bright citrus aroma that balances the sweetness.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (prickly pear, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangethe original
  3. Pearfits about as well
  4. Figfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against prickly pear, sugar. 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.

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