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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A chilled fruit salad made with oranges, bananas, grapes, sugar, and gelatin.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and grape work together. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 496 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel and slice the bananas in a dish and sprinkle with sugar.

  2. Peel the oranges and cut them into small squares, removing the seeds, and sprinkle with sugar.

  3. Cut the grapes into small pieces, removing the seeds, and sprinkle with sugar.

Make the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in 1 pint of cold water.

  2. Add 1 pint of sugar and 1½ pints of boiling water to the soaked gelatine and mix well.

Combine and set

  1. Combine all the fruits in a large bowl and pour the gelatine mixture over them.

  2. Let it harden on ice until ready to serve.

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

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

  2. Orange + grapetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

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

  3. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

  4. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

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

  5. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly gel that holds the fruit in place.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and helps draw out juices that blend into the gelatine.
Bananas
Add soft texture and natural sweetness to the salad.
Oranges
Add juicy texture and bright, acidic flavour.

The step that matters

Soaking the gelatine before adding the boiling water. Gelatine must hydrate in cold liquid first so its protein granules dissolve evenly when hot water is added. Adding it dry or to hot water directly can leave lumps and weaken the set.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, grape, sugar. 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.

More fruit salad recipes

Dressing 41Ambrosia 24Pineapple 21Grape 15Frozen 10Mixed 8 See all 267 →

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