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Dessert

Fresh Fruit Cup

A chilled assortment of fresh fruit served with lemon juice, salt, sugar, mint, and optional spirits, topped with crunchy wafers or cake.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and mint are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,998 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Fresh Fruit Cup

½ cup or more of fruit per serving

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Chill the assorted fruits.

  2. If using bananas, add them last to prevent darkening.

  3. Sprinkle cut peaches with lemon juice to prevent darkening.

  4. Prepare ½ cup or more of fruit for each serving.

  5. Heap the fruit in a glass, silver, or pottery bowl.

Season and chill

  1. Sprinkle lightly with coarse sea salt and then with sugar.

  2. Flavor the mixture with mint leaves or a splash of rum, sherry, lemon juice, or brandy.

  3. Cover and chill again to blend the flavors.

  4. Taste the mixture and adjust salt, sugar, or lemon juice as needed.

Serve

  1. Before serving, remove limp mint leaves and add fresh ones.

  2. Serve with crunchy nut wafers or wedges of sponge or angel cake.

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. Lemon + minttop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,998 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Mint + rumtop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together139 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  3. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

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

  4. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  5. Lemon + rumtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,341 recipes

    Shared aroma: alpha-pinene (pine, turpentine).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Sugar
Adds sweetness and draws juice out of the fruit, softening it into a syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the fruit flavor and slows browning on cut fruit.
Coarse sea salt
Sharpens the sweetness and enhances the natural flavor of the fruit.

The step that matters

Add bananas last. Cut bananas darken quickly once exposed to air. Adding them at the end, and keeping them coated in the mixture, limits browning and keeps the cup looking fresh.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, mint, rum):

  1. Pineapplefits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, mint, rum. 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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