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Dessert

Watermelon Dessert

A chilled fruit dessert of diced pineapple and watermelon mixed with sugar and maraschino cherry juice, served in champagne glasses.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and cherry match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 537 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Watermelon Dessert

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Dice the pineapple and let it sit in sugar overnight.

  2. In the morning, dice the red part of the watermelon and mix it with the pineapple in equal parts.

  3. Let the mixture stand for 1 hour.

Serve

  1. Fill champagne glasses with the fruit mixture.

  2. Pour maraschino cherry juice over the fruit.

  3. Chill in ice until ready to serve.

  4. Garnish with a maraschino cherry on top before serving.

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. Pineapple + cherrytop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together537 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + cherrytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,598 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

Sugar
Draws juice out of the pineapple, sweetening it and softening the fruit as it stands.
Pineapple
Provides the main tart-sweet fruit flavour and juicy texture in the dessert.
Watermelon
Adds moisture and mild sweetness, making up the bulk of the fruit mixture.
Maraschino cherry juice
Adds sweetness and a bright cherry aroma to the fruit.

The step that matters

Letting the pineapple sit in sugar overnight. Sugar draws water out of the pineapple by osmosis, creating a syrup that sweetens the fruit. Too short a time leaves the fruit bland and the syrup thin.

Swap the cherry

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Bananafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Cherrythe original

Fit is the average pairing score against 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.

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