Name: Fruit Salad
Ingredients: 1 tin pears or apricots; 6 bananas or 3 oranges; 1 tin pineapples or peaches; ½ cup sugar (to taste); 1 pint raspberries, strawberries, or red/white currants (in season); 1 pint sherry; thick cream (for serving)

Why it works: Banana and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 733 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

1 tin pears or apricots
6 bananas or 3 oranges
1 tin pineapples or peaches
½ cup sugar (to taste)
1 pint raspberries, strawberries, or red/white currants (in season)
1 pint sherry
thick cream (for serving)

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Cut up the large fruit and peel the bananas or oranges, slicing them into very thin rounds.

Macerate and serve

Cover the fruit with sherry and add sugar to taste.
Add enough fruit juice from the tins to cover the mixture, then stir everything together.
Serve the salad with thick cream.

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.

Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together733 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Pear + bananatop 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).
Pineapple + sherrytop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together228 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Banana + sherrytop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together117 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

Sherry: Adds aroma and a boozy flavour that complements the sweet fruit.
Sugar: Sweetens the salad and draws juices out of the fruit as it sits.
Bananas or oranges: Provide the main body and texture of the salad once sliced thinly.
Thick cream: Adds richness and fat that softens the acidity of the fruit.

Swap the white currant

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

Vanillafits better
Strawberryfits better
Applefits better
White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pear, banana, pineapple, sugar, sherry, cream. 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.