Name: Fruit Salad
Ingredients: 1 cup white grapes, seeded; 1 cup English walnuts, chopped; 1 cup celery, cut into cubes; 3 oranges, peeled and sliced; 3 bananas, peeled and sliced; Lettuce leaves, for lining; Juice of 1 lemon; Mayonnaise dressing

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

Set the seeded grapes on ice.
Chop the walnuts and cut the celery into cubes.
Peel and slice the oranges, removing any seeds.
Peel the bananas and cut them into thin crosswise slices.
Line a salad bowl with crisp lettuce leaves.
Mix all the ingredients in a bowl, tossing them lightly.
Squeeze the lemon juice over the salad and top with mayonnaise dressing.

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).
Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together491 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).
Celery + lemontop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together3,467 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).
Celery + lettucetop 4% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,033 recipes

Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).
Grape + bananatop 5% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together496 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

Swap the banana

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (grape, walnut, celery, orange, lettuce, lemon):

Cranberryfits better
Limefits better
Figfits better
Bananathe original

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