Name: Fig and Banana Salad
Ingredients: bananas; freshly preserved figs; castor sugar; lemon juice (optional); whipped cream; vanilla

Why it works: Fig and vanilla match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 324 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Fig and Banana Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Slice equal quantities of bananas and figs.
Sprinkle castor sugar over each layer.
Add lemon juice if desired.
Place in a glass dish and cover with whipped cream flavored with vanilla.
Refrigerate for 2 hours before serving.

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.

Fig + vanillatop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together324 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Banana + vanillatop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,430 recipes

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

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together104 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Sugar + vanillatop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together35,032 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

Sugar and vanilla barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 35,032 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

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (banana, fig, sugar, cream, vanilla):

Strawberryfits better
Apricotfits better
Pearfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, fig, sugar, cream, vanilla. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.