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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A fruit salad of pineapple, oranges, and bananas, sweetened with powdered sugar and sweet muscatel wine, garnished with candied cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and banana match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 733 recipes mention both. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Slice the pineapple very thin, removing the cores.

  2. Slice the oranges into circles and remove the seeds.

  3. Slice the bananas thinly.

  4. Cover the pineapple in sugar and chill for 10 to 12 hours.

Assemble and serve

  1. In a salad bowl, combine the pineapple, oranges, and bananas.

  2. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and pour over the sweet muscatel wine.

  3. Garnish with candied cherries cut in quarters.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together1,118 recipes

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

  4. Pineapple + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together325 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Orange + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together2,046 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Sugar drawn out of the sliced fruit mixes with juices to create a syrup.
Sweet muscatel wine
Adds sweetness and a fragrant, grape-based aroma to the fruit.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves into the fruit juices, sweetening the salad and softening the fruit.

Flavor stand-ins for the orange

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

  1. Vanillabetter flavor fit
  2. Strawberrybetter flavor fit
  3. Pearbetter flavor fit
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, banana, wine, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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