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Salad

Grape Fruit Salad

A chilled salad of grapefruit segments set in lemon gelatin, served with mayonnaise and optional lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Grapefruit and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Grape Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the grapefruit, divide into sections, and separate the membrane from the pulp.

  2. Break the pulp into large pieces and place in a colander to drain into a dish.

Make the gelatin

  1. Dissolve the lemon gelatin in boiling water and let it cool.

  2. Add the juice from the grapefruit to the gelatin mixture.

  3. Pour the mixture into a shallow pan and refrigerate until firm.

  4. Cut the gelatin into 1-inch pieces and serve with the grapefruit sections.

Serve

  1. Serve in the grapefruit shell or on a bed of head lettuce with a tablespoon of oil mayonnaise.

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. Grapefruit + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  2. Grapefruit + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  3. Lemon + lettucetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  4. Gelatin + lettucetop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together128 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

  5. Lemon + gelatintop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,215 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-pinene (pine, resin).

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

What each ingredient does

Grapefruit
Provides the fresh fruit pieces and juice that add tartness and flavour to the salad.
Lemon gelatin
Sets the juice mixture into a firm, sliceable body that holds the salad together.
Oil mayonnaise
Adds richness and a creamy fat to the serving, softening the fruit's tartness.

The step that matters

Let the gelatin cool before adding the juice. Gelatin must be cooled to a warm, syrupy state before adding juice, because very hot liquid or an acidic juice added too early can weaken its setting and keep it from firming properly.

“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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