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Dessert

Strawberry Salad

A chilled fruit salad of strawberries, pineapple, and marshmallows, sweetened with powdered sugar and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Strawberry Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Drain the strawberries well.

  2. Combine strawberries, pineapple, and powdered sugar in a bowl.

  3. Let the mixture stand on ice for 1 hour.

Add the marshmallows

  1. Soak marshmallows in warm water to remove starch, then clip them finely.

  2. Mix the clipped marshmallows with the fruit mixture.

Serve

  1. Serve in sherbet glasses topped with a spoonful of whipped cream and a whole strawberry in the center.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

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

  2. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Pineapple + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,574 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the main fruit flavor, juice, and bright red color for the salad.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out its juices, creating a syrup as it stands.
Marshmallows
Add softness and chewy body to the salad once clipped and mixed in.
Pineapple
Adds tangy, sweet flavor and juicy texture to the fruit mixture.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand on ice for 1 hour. Sugar draws water out of the fruit by osmosis, so the mixture needs time and cold to form a syrup without the fruit fermenting or going soft. Draining the strawberries first keeps the syrup from becoming watery.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, 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.

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