Skip to main content
Dessert

Pineapple and Banana Salad

A fruit salad of diced pineapple, sliced bananas, maraschino syrup, and lemon cups.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pineapple and banana match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 733 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Pineapple and Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Drain the juice from the diced pineapple.

  2. In a bowl, combine the pineapple and sliced bananas.

  3. Pour maraschino syrup over the fruit mixture.

  4. Cut the lemons in half and remove the centers to create lemon cups.

Serve

  1. Serve the salad in the lemon cups.

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. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  3. Banana + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  4. Pineapple + syruptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together568 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Syrup + lemontop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,235 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Provides the main sweet, juicy fruit body of the salad.
Bananas
Add soft texture and natural sweetness to the fruit mixture.
Maraschino syrup
Adds sweetness and a cherry-like aroma to the fruit.
Lemons
Serve as edible cups and add acidity that brightens the sweet fruit.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pineapple, banana, syrup):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, banana, syrup. 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.

You might also like

Lemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesPineapple SherbetPineapple Sherbet116 recipesLemon SherbetLemon Sherbet103 recipes