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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A mixed fruit salad with canned and fresh fruit, sweetened with a lemon jelly syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and apple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 649 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Dice the contents of the tins of pears, apricots, and pineapples.

  2. Slice the bananas.

  3. Peel the oranges, removing as much of the inner skin and seeds as possible, then tear the quarters in half.

  4. Peel and core the apples, then slice them thinly.

Make the syrup

  1. In a pan, combine the juice from the fruit with water to make 2 quarts, then add the sugar and bring to a boil.

  2. Pour the boiling syrup over a square of lemon jelly to thicken it, then let it cool.

Assemble

  1. Once cooled, pour the syrup over the prepared fruit.

  2. Add glace cherries, strawberries, raspberries, or any other fresh fruit for color.

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. Pear + appletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together649 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Pear + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together218 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  4. Pineapple + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Apricot + appletop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together777 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-undecalactone (peach, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps make the fruit taste bright and pleasant.
Lemon jelly
Sets the boiled syrup so it thickens as it cools, giving body to the dish.
Glace cherries
Add sweetness and bright color to the finished salad.

The step that matters

Pour the syrup only after it has cooled. Adding hot syrup to the fruit would soften it and cook the fresh pieces, and the lemon jelly needs to cool to thicken properly.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Peachfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, apricot, pineapple, banana, orange, apple, 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.

More fruit salad recipes

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

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