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Dessert

Mock Pineapple

A chilled fruit salad made from thinly sliced apples and oranges, sweetened with sugar and flavored with lemon juice and sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Mock Pineapple

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare, core, and slice the apples thinly.

  2. Pare and slice the oranges crosswise.

  3. Layer a slice of apple on each orange slice, saving all the juice.

Dress and serve

  1. Sprinkle with sugar and squeeze lemon juice and sherry over the fruit.

  2. Serve ice cold.

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. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

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

  3. Apple + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together395 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Apple + winetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,207 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  5. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide firm, tart fruit that holds its shape as the slices layer and chill.
Oranges
Supply the sweet-tart juice and the main body of the dish.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sugar.
Sherry wine
Adds aromatic depth and a subtle sweetness to the juices.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out juice as it sits.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Grapefits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, orange, sherry, wine, 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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