Name: Fruit Salad I
Ingredients: 1 banana; 1 orange; 1 grapefruit; 1 cashew or malacca pear; 1 papaw (papaya); A few cherries; 2 oz sugar; ¼ pt water

Why it works: Orange and grapefruit match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and 232 recipes mention both. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: tree nuts (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Make the syrup

Boil the water and the sugar together until a thin syrup is formed, then set aside to cool.

Prepare the fruit

Wash and peel the fruit.
Discard the seeds and cut into neat chunks.
Reserve the juices.
Mix the fruit in a glass bowl, straining off any juices.

Assemble and chill

Pour the cool syrup into the bowl, enough to float the fruit.
Chill before serving.

Recipe from the Recipes Wiki (Fandom).

This recipe comes from the Recipes Wiki on Fandom and is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Our formatting and summaries are shared under the same licence.

Steps grouped into stages for easier reading; the method is the source's own.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Orange + grapefruittop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together232 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Banana + peartop 2% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together87 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Banana + papayatop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together42 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Orange + papayatop 4% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together48 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Banana + orangetop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together1,117 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the grapefruit

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (banana, orange, pear, papaya, sugar):

Vanillabetter flavor fit
Pineapplebetter flavor fit
Applebetter flavor fit
Grapefruitthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, orange, pear, papaya, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).