Skip to main content
Dessert

Fruit Dessert

A chilled fruit salad mixed with a lemon‑sugar syrup, optionally flavored with sherry and thickened with gelatin, served with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Fruit Dessert

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, mix ½ cup water and 1 cup sugar with a little lemon juice to make a syrup.

  2. To thicken the syrup, soften 1 teaspoon Knox gelatine in cold water and dissolve it in the hot syrup.

  3. Cool the syrup and mix it with the fruits.

Assemble and serve

  1. Combine oranges, grapes, pineapples, and cherries in any desired proportion to make a salad.

  2. Add a few tablespoons of sherry to enhance the flavor, if desired.

  3. Serve the fruit salad quite cold with whipped cream.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

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

  2. Grape + pineappletop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together709 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

  3. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

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

  5. Pineapple + sherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 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

Gelatine
Sets the syrup slightly so it clings to the fruit instead of pooling.
Sugar
Sweetens the syrup and helps give the fruit a glossy, sugary coating.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweet syrup and balances its sweetness.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and a light, creamy contrast to the cold, tart fruit.

The step that matters

Dissolve the gelatine fully in the hot syrup. Gelatine must be softened in cold water first, then dissolved completely in hot liquid. If it stays grainy or is added to cold syrup, it will not thicken evenly and may leave lumps.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (orange, grape, pineapple, sugar, sherry, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, grape, pineapple, sugar, sherry, 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.

You might also like

Orange Bundt CakeOrange Bundt Cake349 recipesLemon CakeLemon Cake228 recipesLemon IceLemon Ice147 recipesOrange Cream Rice PuddingOrange Cream Rice Pudding121 recipes