Name: Fruit Salad
Ingredients: 4 oranges; 3 bananas; 2 pears; ½ pineapple; 1 lemon; ¾ cup sugar; ½ pint water; 2 tablespoons brandy

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 ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

Pare the lemon and one orange very thinly.
Boil the rinds with water, sugar, pear cores, and a bit of pineapple rind for about 15 minutes.

Prepare the fruit

Peel the oranges with a sharp knife, removing all the white skin.
Cut the oranges into natural divisions, leaving the skin behind.
Remove the seeds and place the orange pulp in a bowl.
Cut the pears, bananas, and pineapple, ensuring all black specks are removed from the pineapple.
Add the cut fruit to the bowl with the orange pulp.

Combine and serve

Strain the boiling syrup over the fruit, then add the brandy and strained lemon juice.
Let it sit for about 30 minutes in a cool place, stirring occasionally with a silver spoon.
Once cold, pile it neatly in a glass dish and sprinkle with desiccated coconut if available.

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.

Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together733 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Banana + peartop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together87 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Pear + pineappletop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together169 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,664 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges: Provide the main fruit pulp and juice, giving the salad its bright sweetness and acidity.
Sugar: Sweetens the syrup and helps draw flavour from the rinds and fruit.
Brandy: Adds aroma and a warm flavour that complements the fruit.

The step that matters

Removing all the white pith from the oranges. White pith is bitter, so any left on the segments will carry into the salad and spoil its flavour.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, banana, pear, pineapple, sugar, brandy):

Vanillafits better
Apricotfits better
Figfits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, banana, pear, pineapple, sugar, brandy. 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.