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Dessert

Strawberry Salad

A fruit salad of strawberries, red and white currants, powdered sugar, and thick cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and white currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Strawberry Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pick the strawberries and currants.

  2. Layer the fruits on a dish.

  3. Sprinkle powdered sugar over the fruits.

Serve

  1. Pour thick cream over the fruits just before serving.

  2. Optionally, add other fruits like gooseberries, cherries, or raspberries.

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. Red currant + white curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. White currant + sugartop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes
  5. Red currant + creamtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together247 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the main fruit flavor, sweetness and juicy texture of the salad.
Red currants
Add tart acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar and fruit.
White currants
Add mild tartness and bright color contrast to the fruit layers.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the fruit juices to sweeten them and draw out liquid.
Thick cream
Adds richness and fat that softens the acidity of the currants.

Swap the white currant

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Strawberryfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against red currant, sugar, cream. 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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