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Dessert

Fruit Salad Dressing

A pineapple-based dressing with flour, butter, eggs, sugar, lemon juice, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fruit Salad Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Make the custard

  1. Heat the pineapple juice in a double boiler.

  2. Blend flour with butter.

  3. Beat the egg yolks with sugar.

  4. Add beaten egg whites and mix in hot juice.

  5. Recook and flavor with lemon juice.

Serve

  1. When ready to serve, fold in the beaten cream.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

  5. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Egg yolks
Thicken the dressing as they set with gentle heat, giving it body and richness.
Flour
Stabilizes the mixture and helps it thicken smoothly as it cooks.
Butter
Adds fat for richness and a smooth, mellow mouthfeel.
Sugar
Sweetens the dressing and balances the acidity of the juices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and cuts the sweetness.
Cream
Whipped stiff and folded in at the end, it lightens the dressing with air and softness.

The step that matters

Recook the custard gently. Egg yolks thicken as they heat, but high heat can curdle or scramble them. Keeping the double boiler gentle lets the mixture thicken smoothly and stay silky.

Swap the pineapple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, butter, egg, sugar, lemon, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, egg, sugar, lemon, cream. 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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