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Fruit Salad

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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

  1. Soak the gelatine in 1 pint of water.

  2. Dissolve the soaked gelatine in 1 quart of boiling water.

  3. Add the juice of 3 lemons and sweeten to taste.

  4. Let the mixture cool until it begins to set.

  5. Stir in the pieces of oranges, pineapple, and bananas.

  6. Place the mixture in the refrigerator to cool and harden.

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. Lemon + orangetop 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. Banana + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together549 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  4. Pineapple + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together651 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Pineapple + grapetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

Swap the coconut

The recipe marks coconut as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (lemon, sugar, orange, pineapple, banana, grape):

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

Fit is the average pairing score against lemon, sugar, orange, pineapple, banana, grape. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

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