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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A mixed fruit salad of pineapple, bananas, strawberries, oranges, and lemon juice, sweetened with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Grate the pineapple.

  2. Peel and slice the bananas.

  3. Peel, seed, and remove the white membrane from the oranges.

  4. Pick over the strawberries.

Assemble and chill

  1. Arrange the fruits in layers in a glass dish.

  2. Add considerable sugar to the fruits.

  3. Squeeze the juice of the lemons over all.

  4. Set on ice for 3 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 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. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Adds tart-sweet juice and bulk to the layers.
Bananas
Add soft texture and mild sweetness, and release moisture as they sit.
Strawberries
Add fresh aroma, color, and a juicy, slightly tart bite.
Oranges
Add sweet citrus juice and aroma to the fruit mixture.
Lemons
Add acidity that brightens the flavor and slows browning of cut fruit.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and draws juice out of the fruit, forming a syrup.

The step that matters

Squeeze the lemon juice over the fruit promptly. Cut bananas and oranges brown through enzyme reactions with air. The lemon juice's acid slows this browning, so it should go on soon after the fruit is cut and layered.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, banana, orange, 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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