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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A custard-based fruit salad with pineapple, nuts, oranges, cherries, and grapes, served on lettuce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange 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 ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Make the dressing

  1. Cream together the sugar and butter until smooth.

  2. Add the beaten egg yolks, salt, and lemon juice; cook until thick.

  3. Remove from heat and fold in the whipped cream.

Assemble and serve

  1. Mix in the pineapple, nuts, oranges, cherries, and grapes.

  2. Serve the mixture on a bed of lettuce.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg yolks
Thicken the cooked dressing and add richness as they set with heat.
Whipped cream
Adds lightness and a creamy texture when folded in after cooking.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar and cream.
Sugar
Sweetens the dressing and helps it cream smoothly with the butter.
Butter
Adds fat and richness to the dressing.

The step that matters

Cook the egg yolk mixture until thick. Egg yolks thicken when heated, but if they get too hot they can scramble and curdle. Cook gently and stop once it thickens, then cool before folding in the whipped cream.

Swap the nuts

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, butter, egg, lemon, cream, pineapple, orange):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Pistachiofits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, butter, egg, lemon, cream, pineapple, orange. 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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