Name: Fruit Salad
Ingredients: 3 oranges; 3 bananas; 3 apples; ½ can pineapple; juice of 1 lemon; sugar to taste

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

Cut the oranges, bananas, apples, and pineapple into small pieces.
Squeeze the lemon juice over the fruit.
Sprinkle sugar over the fruit to taste.

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together733 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Banana + appletop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together435 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Apple + pineappletop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together530 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,664 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples: Add firm, crisp pieces that hold their shape in the salad.
Bananas: Add soft texture and natural sweetness to the mix.
Lemon juice: Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and slows browning of cut fruit.

Swap the lemon

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

Vanillafits better
Pearfits better
Strawberryfits better
Lemonthe original

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