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Fruit Cocktail

A chilled fruit mixture of grapefruit pulp, pineapple, strawberries, served over wine dressing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 709 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Fruit Cocktail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Remove the pulp from the grapefruit.

  2. Mix the grapefruit pulp with the shredded pineapple, using half as much pineapple as grapefruit.

  3. Add four strawberries for each serving.

  4. Chill thoroughly.

Serve

  1. Pour the mixture over wine dressing.

  2. Serve in champagne glasses and garnish each with a whole strawberry.

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. Grape + pineappletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  2. Grape + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together819 recipes

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

  3. Pineapple + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together325 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

Grapefruit pulp
Provides the main fruit body and a tart, slightly bitter citrus flavour.
Shredded pineapple
Adds sweetness and a juicy, tropical flavour that balances the grapefruit.
Strawberries
Add sweetness, fragrance and colour to the fruit mixture.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Plumfits about as well
  3. Pineapplethe original
  4. Pearfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against grape, wine. 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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