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Dessert

Fruit Salad

Fruit salad with cranberries, cherries, pecans, apples, and a custard dressing made from eggs, sugar, butter, mustard, cayenne, lemon, and whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Stew the cranberries and strain them.

  2. Mix the strained cranberries with cherries, pecans, and apples.

Make the dressing

  1. In a saucepan, combine the eggs, sugar, butter, mustard, cayenne, and lemon juice.

  2. Stir the mixture over low heat until it thickens like a soft custard.

  3. Let the custard cool completely, then fold in the whipped cream.

Serve

  1. Pour the dressing over the fruit salad and serve.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  2. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Mustard + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,816 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Pecans + buttertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,416 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-pentanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Eggs
Thicken the dressing into a soft custard as they set with gentle heat.
Butter
Adds richness and a smooth mouthfeel to the custard dressing.
Sugar
Sweetens the dressing and balances the tartness of the fruit and lemon.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the custard and cuts its richness.
Whipped cream
Lightens the cooled custard, giving it a fluffy, airy texture.

The step that matters

Stir the custard over low heat. Egg proteins set into a thickened custard only at gentle heat. Too much heat curdles the eggs into lumps, so the mixture must be stirred constantly and kept low.

Swap the pecans

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (apple, egg, sugar, butter, mustard, pepper, lemon):

  1. Chestnutfits better
  2. Almondfits better
  3. Chickpeafits better
  4. Pecansthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against apple, egg, sugar, butter, mustard, pepper, lemon. 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.

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

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