Name: Grape Salad
Ingredients: 2 cups grapes, seeds removed and skins discarded; 2 bananas, sliced; ½ cup mayonnaise

Why it works: Grape and banana work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 496 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Grape Salad

Ingredients

2 cups grapes, seeds removed and skins discarded
2 bananas, sliced
½ cup mayonnaise

Directions

In a bowl, combine the grapes and sliced bananas.
Add the mayonnaise and mix gently until well combined.
Serve immediately.

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.

Grape + bananatop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together496 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Grapes: Add juicy texture and natural sweetness to the salad.
Bananas: Add soft texture and sweetness, and become creamier when mixed with the dressing.
Mayonnaise: Adds fat and creaminess, coating the fruit and adding moisture.

“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.