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Dessert

Fruit Dessert

Fruit salad of oranges, grapes, pineapples, and cherries served with a syrup of water, sugar, lemon juice, sherry, and optional gelatin, topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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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, combine ½ cup water and 1 cup sugar with a little lemon juice to make a syrup.

  2. Cool the syrup.

Assemble and serve

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

  2. Mix the cooled syrup with the fruits.

  3. Stir in a few tablespoons of sherry.

  4. Soften 1 teaspoon gelatin in cold water.

  5. Dissolve the softened gelatin in the hot syrup.

  6. 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

Sugar
Sweetens the syrup that coats and flavours the fruit.
Gelatine
Helps the syrup set lightly, giving the fruit a softer, more cohesive texture.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and fat that contrasts with the tart fruit and syrup.

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.

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Dressing 41Ambrosia 24Pineapple 21Grape 15Frozen 10Mixed 8 See all 267 →

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