Name: Fresh Fruit Cup
Ingredients: 3 oranges; 1 cup diced pineapple; 3 well-ripened bananas; 1 cup strawberries; 2 tablespoons lemon juice; sugar to taste

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fresh Fruit Cup

Oven, in the book's wordsA moderate oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Peel and dice the pineapple, bananas, and oranges.
Wash and hull the strawberries.

Combine and chill

Mix all the fruits together with the lemon juice and sugar.
Refrigerate until very 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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together733 recipes

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

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,664 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,118 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,964 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Bananas: Add soft texture and natural sweetness that thickens the fruit mixture slightly.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and slows browning of cut fruit.
Oranges: Contribute juice and citrus acidity that moistens and flavors the cup.