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Salad

Pineapple Salad

A salad of sliced pineapple, grapes, and lettuce dressed with mayonnaise.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Pineapple Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the pineapple into slices and remove the eyes.

  2. Sprinkle the slices lightly with sugar and let them stand for a few hours to extract the juice.

  3. Drain the pineapple slices and add half as much grapefruit, tart apple, or seeded Malaga grapes.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange the mixture on lettuce leaves.

  2. Dress with mayonnaise and decorate with halved grapes or candied cherries.

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Pineapple + grapefruittop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Grapefruit + grapetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together79 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-p-menthene-8-thiol (grapefruit).

  5. Pineapple + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together271 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Provides the main fruit flavour and juice, which is drawn out by sugar standing time.
Sugar
Draws juice out of the pineapple and adds sweetness to the fruit.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess that coats the fruit and softens its acidity.

The step that matters

Standing the sugared pineapple. Letting the sugared slices stand for a few hours lets sugar draw out their juice through osmosis, softening the fruit and building a syrup. Draining afterwards keeps the salad from becoming watery under the dressing.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Lettucethe original
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Sweet potatofits less well
  4. Tomatofits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, sugar, grapefruit, grape. 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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