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Dessert

Apple and Orange Salad

A fruit salad of thinly sliced apples and oranges, sweetened with powdered sugar and flavored with rum.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,230 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Apple and Orange Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Peel and slice the apples very thinly.

  2. Mix the sliced apples with the oranges.

  3. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and drizzle with rum.

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 + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Apple + rumtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together214 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  3. Orange + rumtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together801 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Rum + sugartop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the crisp, juicy body of the salad.
Oranges
Add juice and bright, sweet-tart flavour that moistens the fruit.
Rum
Adds aroma and a warm, boozy flavour to the fruit.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the fruit and dissolves into the juices it releases.

Swap the orange

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, rum, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, rum, sugar. 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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