Name: Fruit Cup
Ingredients: watermelon, diced; fresh mint leaves, chopped; pinctar or grape juice

Why it works: Mint and grape work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 262 recipes. Both carry alpha-pinene, which smells pine, turpentine. The science ↓

Fruit Cup

Ingredients

watermelon, diced
fresh mint leaves, chopped
pinctar or grape juice

Directions

Fill sherbet glasses with diced watermelon.
Sprinkle chopped mint leaves over the watermelon.
Pour pinctar or grape juice over the contents of each glass.

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.

Mint + grapetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together262 recipes

Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

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

What each ingredient does

Watermelon: Provides the juicy, sweet fruit base and most of the cup's liquid.
Fresh mint leaves: Adds a cool, aromatic flavor that brightens the sweet fruit.
Pinctar or grape juice: Adds extra sweetness and liquid that soaks into the fruit.

“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.