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Dessert

Fruit Salad with Cherries

A chilled fruit salad of cherries, strawberries, bananas, lemon jelly, and maraschino liqueur syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and banana are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,134 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-ol, which smells mushroom, earthy. The science ↓

Fruit Salad with Cherries

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Combine water and sugar in a saucepan and heat until dissolved.

  2. Add lemon juice and maraschino liqueur.

Assemble and serve

  1. Half-fill glasses with stoned and sliced cherries, strawberries, or bananas.

  2. Pour a little syrup over each glass.

  3. Mix equal parts syrup and lemon jelly, then pour into glasses.

  4. The mixture can also be molded.

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. Lemon + bananatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + bananatop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to make a sweet syrup that sweetens the whole salad.
Lemon jelly
Sets the syrup into a jelly that holds the fruit in place.
Maraschino liqueur
Adds a sweet, cherry-like aroma and flavour to the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the syrup.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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