Name: Fruit Salad with Wine Dressing
Ingredients: sliced oranges; sliced bananas; sliced pineapple; Malaga grapes, halved and seeds removed; Maraschino cherries; chopped nuts

Why it works: Banana and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 733 recipes mention both. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Fruit Salad with Wine Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Mix together the sliced oranges, bananas, pineapple, Malaga grapes, Maraschino cherries, and chopped nuts.
Pour the dressing over the fruit.
Chill on ice for 1 to 2 hours before serving.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together733 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Pineapple + grapetop 3% of all pairs

Aroma overlapstrong

Mentioned together709 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).
Banana + grapetop 5% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together496 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together1,664 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Orange + grapetop 6% of all pairs

Aroma overlapmoderate

Mentioned together1,771 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

Flavor stand-ins for the nuts

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

Almondbetter flavor fit
Walnutbetter flavor fit
Pistachiobetter flavor fit
Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, banana, pineapple, grape. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).