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Dessert

Fruit Salad

A fruit salad with a syrup of sugar, water, lemon juice, sherry, claret, and liqueur.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Peach and apricot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and 342 recipes mention both. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Fruit Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Place all the sliced fruit in a china bowl.

Make the syrup

  1. Make a thick syrup by boiling 1 lb of sugar with 1 pint of water.

  2. Add the juice of 2 lemons, sherry, claret, and liqueur to the syrup.

Macerate and chill

  1. Pour the syrup over the fruit and set the bowl on ice to cool.

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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Peach + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together342 recipes

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

  2. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together10,634 recipes

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

  3. Banana + peachtop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together130 recipes

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

  4. Banana + apricottop 3% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together124 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-methyl-1-butanol acetate (fruity).

  5. Orange + apricottop 7% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapstrong
    Mentioned together703 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

Loaf sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a thick syrup that sweetens the fruit.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the fruit and balances the sweetness.
Sherry
Adds aroma and flavour to the syrup that soaks into the fruit.
Claret
Adds wine flavour and depth to the syrup.

The step that matters

Pour the syrup over the fruit and set the bowl on ice to cool. The syrup must be cooled before or while it is poured so the soft fruit does not cook and turn mushy. Chilling also keeps the fruit fresh while the flavours soak in.

Flavor stand-ins for the tangerine

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (banana, red currant, orange, peach, apricot, sugar, lemon):

  1. Vanillabetter flavor fit
  2. Raspberrybetter flavor fit
  3. Plumbetter flavor fit
  4. Tangerinethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, red currant, orange, peach, apricot, sugar, lemon. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes. This compares flavor only: it does not check the job the ingredient does in the dish (bulk, moisture, acidity, structure).

“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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