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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A mixed fruit salad of oranges, apples, bananas, and grapes, optionally sweetened with sugar or cream and topped with nuts.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Apple and grape match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,659 recipes. Both carry 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, which smells green bell pepper, earthy. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the oranges, quarter them, and remove skin and seeds.

  2. Peel and core the apples, then cut them into thin slices.

  3. Wash and dry the grapes, and remove them from the stalks.

  4. Skin and slice the bananas.

Assemble and serve

  1. Layer the prepared fruit in a glass dish alternately.

  2. Squeeze the juice from 2 sweet oranges and pour it over the salad.

  3. Sprinkle with castor sugar or use cream instead of juice if desired.

  4. Add grated nuts for extra flavor if you like.

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. Apple + grapetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,659 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine (green bell pepper, earthy).

  2. Apple + bananatop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together435 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Banana + grapetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together496 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  4. Orange + grapetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  5. Orange + appletop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Oranges
Provide juice and sweetness that moisten and flavor the salad.
Apples
Add crisp texture and a tart contrast to the softer fruit.
Bananas
Add creamy body and mild sweetness to the salad.
Grapes
Add juicy bursts of sweetness and texture.

Swap the nuts

The recipe marks nuts as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, apple, banana, grape, sugar, cream):

  1. Almondfits better
  2. Hazelnutfits better
  3. Chestnutfits better
  4. Nutsthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, apple, banana, grape, 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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Dressing 41Ambrosia 24Pineapple 21Grape 15Frozen 10Mixed 8 See all 267 →

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