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Dessert

French Fruit Salad

A fruit salad of oranges, bananas, lettuce, walnuts, and mayonnaise, optionally garnished with white grapes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Walnut and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 491 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

French Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the lettuce and set aside to crisp.

  2. Peel the oranges, slice them, remove the seeds, and cut the slices into small pieces.

  3. Peel the bananas and cut them crosswise into thin slices.

  4. Crack the walnuts and break the meats into small pieces.

Assemble and serve

  1. Arrange the lettuce in individual serving cups.

  2. Layer the bananas, then oranges, then bananas again in each lettuce cup.

  3. Dress with mayonnaise and garnish with walnuts.

  4. Add chopped white grapes if desired.

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. Walnut + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together491 recipes

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

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

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

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

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

  4. Walnut + grapetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide juicy, sweet-tart pieces that add brightness and moisture to the salad.
Bananas
Add creamy sweetness and soft texture between the layers.
English walnuts
Add crunch and a toasty, nutty flavor against the soft fruit.
Mayonnaise
Adds fat and creaminess that binds the fruit and coats it with richness.

Swap the grape

The recipe marks grape as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, banana, walnut, lettuce):

  1. Figfits better
  2. Cherryfits better
  3. Limefits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, banana, walnut, lettuce. 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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