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Drink

Fruit Cocktail

A chilled mixed fruit drink with apples, oranges, pineapple, lemon juice, sherry wine, sugar, maraschino cherries, maraschino wine, and ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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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 ↓

Fruit Cocktail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel and dice the apples.

  2. Halve the oranges and scoop out the pulp.

  3. Cut the canned pineapple into small pieces.

  4. Mix the fruit together.

Macerate and chill

  1. Add the lemon juice, sherry wine, and sugar to taste.

  2. Chill thoroughly.

Serve

  1. Serve in cold sherbet glasses.

  2. Top each glass with 3 Maraschino cherries, 1 teaspoon Maraschino wine, and 1 teaspoon chopped ice.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Apple + pineappletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together530 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Pineapple + sherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Tart apples
Provide firm, acidic fruit pieces that hold their shape and add tartness.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit flavour and slows browning of cut apples.
Sherry wine
Adds aroma and a mild, fortified-wine sweetness and depth to the fruit juices.
Canned pineapple
Contributes sweetness and juicy texture to the fruit mixture.

The step that matters

Chill thoroughly. Chilling lets the fruit juices and sherry blend and the flavours meld, and keeps the fruit cold and crisp. Serving it warm would taste flatter and soften the fruit.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, orange, pineapple, sherry, wine, sugar):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, orange, pineapple, sherry, wine, sugar. 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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