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Salad

Mock Pineapple Salad

A fruit salad of sliced apples and oranges, sweetened with sherry, powdered sugar, and optional lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Mock Pineapple Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Core and peel the apples, then slice them against the grain.

  2. Peel the oranges and remove all the white pulp, then slice them thicker than the apples and crosswise.

  3. Layer a slice of orange on each slice of apple in a glass dish.

Make the syrup and serve

  1. Save all the orange juice for the syrup, then pour it and the sherry over the fruit.

  2. Sift powdered sugar over the fruit. If too sweet, add a little lemon juice to the syrup.

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. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Apple + sherrytop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together395 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  4. Orange + sherrytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together823 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Apples
Provide the crisp, firm body of the salad that holds its shape under the syrup.
Oranges
Supply juice for the syrup and bright citrus flavor that balances the sweetness.
Sherry
Adds a fortified wine aroma and depth to the syrup.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the syrup and dissolves into the orange juice and sherry.

The step that matters

Sifting the powdered sugar and tasting the syrup. Powdered sugar dissolves into the acidic juice and sherry, so its sweetness builds gradually. Adding it all at once or skipping a taste test can make the salad cloying, which is why the lemon juice is held back as an adjustment.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, orange, sherry, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, orange, sherry, 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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