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Salad

Fruit Compote Salad

A fruit salad of pineapple, orange, grapefruit, lettuce, and Denver dressing, optionally topped with nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Grapefruit and lettuce match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Fruit Compote Salad

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Place a slice of pineapple on a bed of lettuce.

  2. Add a section of orange and a section of grapefruit on top.

  3. Drizzle with Denver salad dressing.

  4. Sprinkle chopped nuts over the top 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. Grapefruit + lettucetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together118 recipes

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

  2. Orange + grapefruittop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

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

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Pineapple + grapefruittop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Pineapple + lettucetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together271 recipes

    Shared aroma: nonanal (fat, citrus).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Adds sweetness and juicy, tart-sweet fruit flavour to the salad.
Orange
Adds sweetness and bright citrus aroma to the salad.
Grapefruit
Adds acidity and a slightly bitter citrus note to balance the sweetness.
Denver salad dressing
Adds moisture and savoury flavour that coats the fruit and lettuce.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pineapple, orange, grapefruit, lettuce):

  1. Walnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Beansfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, orange, grapefruit, 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.

More fruit salad recipes

Dressing 41Ambrosia 24Pineapple 21Grape 15Frozen 10Mixed 8 See all 267 →

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