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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A gelatin-based fruit salad with pineapple, oranges, bananas, candied cherries, and lemon juice.

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 Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Dissolve the gelatine in ½ pint of cold water.

  2. In a separate pot, combine 1½ pints of hot water, 1 pint of sugar, and the juice of 2 lemons.

  3. Strain this mixture.

  4. Pour the strained mixture into the dissolved gelatine and stir well.

Add the fruit and set

  1. Add the grated pineapple, chopped oranges, chopped bananas, and candied cherries to the gelatine mixture.

  2. Pour the mixture over the fruit and set it in a cold place to congeal.

  3. Make this salad the day before serving.

Serve

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

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

  5. 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, sliceable gel that holds the fruit in place.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps balance the sharpness of the lemon juice.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and the flavour of the fruit.
Pineapple
Adds fruity flavour and moisture to the salad.
Candied cherries
Add sweetness, colour and chewy bits to the set salad.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine fully before adding the liquid. Gelatine must dissolve completely in the cold water before the hot sugar mixture is added; undissolved granules leave gritty or uneven patches and weaken the set once the salad chills.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

More fruit salad recipes

Dressing 41Ambrosia 24Pineapple 21Grape 15Frozen 10Mixed 8 See all 267 →

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