Name: Fruit Salad
Ingredients: 1 tin apricots; 1 pineapple; 1 tin peaches; 1 dozen crystallized cherries; 1 cup white wine; ⅓ cup liqueur (such as noyau); castor sugar (to taste)

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 Salad

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

Slice all the fruit except the cherries into small pieces and place them in a bowl.

Soak and serve

Mix the juice with the white wine and liqueur, adding caster sugar if necessary.
Pour the mixture over the fruit and let it soak for about an hour, covered with a plate.
After soaking, scatter the crystallized cherries on top.

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.

Apricot + peachtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together342 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Apricot + pineappletop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together377 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Pineapple + peachtop 3% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together168 recipes

Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).
Apricot + white winetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together106 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).
Pineapple + white winetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together45 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

White wine: Adds acidity and aroma while softening the fruit flavour in the soaking liquid.
Liqueur: Adds aroma and flavour to the soaking liquid, carried into the fruit.
Apricots: Provide sweetness, softness and fruit flavour once soaked in the liquid.
Peaches: Provide sweetness, softness and fruit flavour once soaked in the liquid.
Crystallized cherries: Add sweetness and a chewy texture as a topping.