Name: Fruit Salad
Ingredients: 2 bananas; 2 apples; 1 orange; ½ cup English walnuts; salad dressing

Why it works: Banana and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 435 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Dice the bananas, apples, and orange.
Chop the walnuts.
Mix the diced fruit and chopped walnuts with salad dressing.

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.

Banana + appletop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together435 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together2,230 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,118 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).
Banana + walnuttop 12% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together508 recipes

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

Walnuts: Add crunch and a toasty, nutty contrast to the soft fruit.
Salad dressing: Coats the fruit and adds moisture and a creamy, sweet-tangy flavour.