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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A gelatin-based fruit salad made with orange and lemon juice, bananas, walnuts, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the gelatine

  1. Soak the gelatine in cold water for 30 minutes.

  2. Add boiling water and stir until dissolved.

Assemble and set

  1. Mix in the orange juice, lemon juice, sliced bananas, chopped walnuts, and sugar.

  2. Set aside in a cool place until the gelatine sets.

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

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

  3. Lemon + walnuttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,149 recipes

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

  4. Banana + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together508 recipes

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

  5. Orange + walnuttop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

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, sliceable jelly structure as it cools.
Bananas
Add body and sweetness, with soft pieces suspended in the set gelatine.
Walnuts
Add crunch and texture contrast against the soft gelatine.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the citrus juices.
Orange juice
Adds fruity flavour and acidity to the gelatine base.

The step that matters

Dissolving the gelatine fully. Gelatine must be hydrated in cold water first, then dissolved in hot water, so it sets evenly. Undissolved granules leave gritty spots and weak patches in the set salad.

Swap the walnut

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

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits about as well
  4. Walnutthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, banana, 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.

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