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Dessert

Tropical Salad

A chilled fruit salad of pineapple, bananas, oranges, lemons, strawberries or cherries, almonds, and sherry jelly.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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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 ↓

Tropical Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare the pineapple, slice it across, and quarter it from apex to base, keeping its natural shape. Place it in the center of a deep dish.

  2. Peel and quarter the bananas lengthwise, keeping them together at one end, and arrange them around the pineapple.

  3. Pare, slice, and remove seeds from the oranges and two lemons, then arrange them between the bananas and at the bottom of the dish.

Make the jelly

  1. Soak the gelatine in ½ cup cold water for 2 hours.

  2. Pour 1½ cups boiling water over the soaked gelatine and stir until dissolved.

  3. Add the juice of 2 lemons and sweeten to taste.

  4. Strain the mixture and add 2 cups sherry.

  5. Pour the jelly into the dish, dropping in the nuts and small fruit before it sets firmly.

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. Orange + lemontop 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. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + almondtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,125 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  5. Pineapple + sherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 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

Gelatine
Sets the sherry and juice mixture into a jelly that holds the fruit in place.
Sherry
Adds flavour and aroma to the jelly.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the sweetness of the fruit and jelly.

The step that matters

Pour the jelly before it sets firmly. Gelatine sets as it cools, so the jelly must still be fluid enough to pour and let the nuts and small fruit settle in. If it sets too far first, the fruit cannot be evenly distributed through the dish.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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