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Drink

Fruit Cocktail

A mixed fruit dessert with grapefruit, oranges, pineapple, peaches, strawberries, cherries, sweetened and flavored with sherry and apricot brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Apricot and peach match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fruit Cocktail

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut the grapefruit, oranges, and pineapple into small pieces.

  2. Cover the fruit with sugar and let it stand overnight on ice.

Add the liquors and berries

  1. In the morning, add sherry and apricot brandy.

  2. An hour before serving, add diced peaches, strawberries, and Maraschino cherries.

  3. Serve in sherbet glasses.

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. Apricot + peachtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

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

  2. Grapefruit + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together233 recipes

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

  3. Pineapple + apricottop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together377 recipes

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

  4. Pineapple + peachtop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together168 recipes

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

  5. Sherry + brandytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Draws juice out of the fruit, creating a syrup that sweetens the whole mixture.
Sherry
Adds aromatic, mildly acidic flavor that complements the citrus and fruit.
Apricot brandy
Adds fruity, aromatic sweetness that deepens the flavor of the fruit.
Grapefruit
Provides bitter-tart citrus flavor and juicy texture.

The step that matters

Covering the fruit with sugar overnight on ice. Sugar pulls water out of the fruit by osmosis, so it needs enough time to dissolve and form syrup. Keeping it cold slows fermentation and spoilage while this happens.

Swap the grapefruit

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, pineapple, sugar, sherry, apricot, brandy, peach):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Grapefruitthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, pineapple, sugar, sherry, apricot, brandy, peach. 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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