Name: Macedoine of Fruits
Ingredients: Pears; Apples; Plums; Cherries; Apricots; Gelatin; ½ cup Champagne (or any convenient wine, such as currant or sherry); Lemon (optional)

Why it works: Pear and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 245 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Macedoine of Fruits

Ingredients

Directions

Carefully stew the pears, apples, plums, cherries, and apricots, then cut them into pieces.
Prepare gelatin jelly and flavor it with ½ cup of Champagne or your chosen wine.
Fill a mold with alternate layers of jelly and fruit.
Serve after freezing. If the fruit is very ripe, do not cook it. Soft fruits like strawberries do not require cooking.
If preferred, flavor the jelly with lemon instead of wine.

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.

Pear + plumtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together245 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Plum + apricottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together284 recipes

Shared aroma: damascenone (apple, rose).
Pear + appletop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together649 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).
Pear + apricottop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together218 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Apple + plumtop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together404 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pear, apple, plum, apricot, gelatin, champagne):

Peachfits better
Strawberryfits better
Pineapplefits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, apple, plum, apricot, gelatin, champagne. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.