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Dessert

Macedoine of Fruit

A chilled fruit salad with a sweet syrup of sugar, lemon, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 cooks put them together in 342 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Macedoine of Fruit

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil sugar, lemon rind, and water for 10 minutes.

  2. Add raspberries or lemon juice, boil again, skim, and cool on ice.

  3. Stir in brandy.

Prepare the fruit

  1. Prepare assorted fruits: remove stalks from currants, stone cherries, pick raspberries, and quarter peaches and apricots.

  2. Crack stones, peel kernels, and add to the fruit.

  3. Chill the fruit bowl on ice until ready to serve.

Serve

  1. Ten minutes before serving, pour the cold syrup over the fruit.

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. Peach + apricottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together342 recipes

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

  2. Brandy + apricottop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together513 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Red currant + peachtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together33 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  4. Red currant + apricottop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together58 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Lemon + peachtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together947 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

Sugar
Dissolves into the water to make a sweet syrup that coats and flavors the fruit.
Raspberries
Add tart, aromatic flavor to the syrup and fruit.
Brandy
Adds a small amount of aroma and depth to the cold syrup.

The step that matters

Cooling the syrup on ice before adding it to the fruit. Pouring warm syrup over soft fruit would soften it and cook it further, so the syrup must be fully cold before it goes over the fruit.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy, red currant, peach, apricot. 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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