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Dessert

Banana and Orange Salad

A fruit salad made with sliced bananas, oranges, and sugar, layered and allowed to rest.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Banana and orange are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,118 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Banana and Orange Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the bananas and slice the bananas.

  2. Peel the oranges, slice the oranges, and remove the seeds from the oranges.

  3. Save the orange juice.

Layer and serve

  1. Layer bananas in a deep glass dish.

  2. Layer oranges on top.

  3. Sprinkle sugar over the fruit.

  4. Add more bananas.

  5. Add more oranges.

  6. Repeat layering until all ingredients are used.

  7. Cover the dish.

  8. Let it stand for 1 hour before serving.

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. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

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

  2. Banana + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,102 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Orange + sugartop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,212 recipes

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

Orange and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,212 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Ripe bananas
Provide the main fruit body and natural sweetness as they soften during standing.
Oranges
Add acidity and juicy fresh flavor that brightens the sweet bananas.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps draw juice out of the fruit as it stands.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Pineapplefits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against banana, sugar. 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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