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Dessert

Fruit Cocktail

A chilled fruit mixture of pineapple, grapefruit, banana, orange, currant jelly, sugar, and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 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 Cocktail

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Mix the shredded pineapple, diced grapefruit pulp, sliced bananas, and diced orange pulp in a bowl.

  2. Melt the currant jelly in a saucepan.

  3. Add the sugar and lemon juice to the melted jelly and heat until the sugar is dissolved.

Serve

  1. Chill the mixture and pour it over the fruit 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. Grapefruit + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

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

  3. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Grapefruit + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together184 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

  5. Pineapple + orangetop 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

Currant jelly
Melts into the syrup that coats the fruit and adds sweetness and body.
Sugar
Dissolves into the warm jelly mixture, adding sweetness and helping form the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet syrup and balances the fruit flavors.
Shredded pineapple
Provides the main fruit body and its sweet, tangy flavor.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Limefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Currantthe original

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