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Dessert

Fruit Salad, with Cooked Dressing

A fruit salad served with a creamy, cooked dressing made from milk, butter, flour, eggs, sugar, mustard, paprika, vinegar, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 16 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 733 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Fruit Salad, with Cooked Dressing

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Prepare a bed of lettuce on a serving platter.

  2. Slice bananas, oranges, pineapples, and grapes, and arrange them on the lettuce.

Make the dressing

  1. In a double boiler, heat ½ pint of milk.

  2. Mix ⅓ cup of butter with 2 heaping tablespoons of flour until smooth, then add to the boiling milk.

  3. Stir until the mixture is smooth and thick.

  4. Add 3 beaten eggs, 2 tablespoons of sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of mustard, and ¼ teaspoon of paprika, blending well.

  5. Remove from heat and stir in ½ cup of vinegar.

  6. Let the dressing cool completely, then fold in an equal amount of whipped cream.

Serve

  1. Drizzle the dressing over the fruit just 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. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Pineapple + grapetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Almond + lettucetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together210 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

  4. Banana + grapetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

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

  5. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Set and thicken the cooked dressing as they cook in the hot mixture.
Flour
Thickens the milk into a smooth, stable base for the dressing.
Butter
Adds richness and smoothness to the flour-thickened milk.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet dressing and fruit.
Whipped cream
Lightens the cooled dressing and adds a creamy texture.

The step that matters

Remove from heat before adding the vinegar and cooling. Eggs thicken as they heat, so the dressing must be taken off the heat to avoid curdling or scrambling. Letting it cool completely before folding in whipped cream keeps the cream from melting or deflating.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, orange, pineapple, grape, almond, milk, butter. 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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