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Salad

Strawberry Fruit Salad

A salad of strawberries and lettuce topped with a whipped cream and mayonnaise dressing, garnished with sugar and lemon slices.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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 ↓

Strawberry Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Arrange ripe strawberries in nests of crisp, white lettuce leaves.

  2. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and orange juice.

Dress and serve

  1. In a bowl, combine whipped cream, mayonnaise dressing, salt, and paprika.

  2. Cover the strawberries with the cream mixture.

  3. Garnish with additional strawberries and slices of lemon dipped in sugar.

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. Lettuce + lemontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,559 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  4. Lettuce + orangetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together373 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  5. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Ripe strawberries
Provide the main fruit flavour and sweetness that the dressing complements.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and a soft, airy texture to the dressing.
Mayonnaise dressing
Adds fat and body, giving the cream mixture a thicker, creamier coating.
Powdered sugar
Dissolves quickly into the juice and sweetens the strawberries.
Orange juice
Adds acidity and brightness that balances the sweetness of the fruit and sugar.

Swap the lettuce

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

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Sweet potatofits better
  3. Beetrootfits better
  4. Lettucethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange, cream, 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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