Name: Iced Fruit
Ingredients: Fruit of your choice (e.g., pineapples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, strawberries, oranges, lemons); 1 egg white; Crushed loaf sugar

Why it works: Pear and plum match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 245 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Iced Fruit

Ingredients

Fruit of your choice (e.g., pineapples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, strawberries, oranges, lemons)
1 egg white
Crushed loaf sugar

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Slice pineapples; halve pears, peaches, and plums after peeling; ice cherries and strawberries with stems on.
Remove all pith from oranges and lemons, then cut them into sections and slices.

Ice the fruit

Dip the fruit in beaten egg white.
Coat the fruit in crushed loaf sugar.
Repeat the dipping and coating process until a thick layer forms.

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.

Pear + plumtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together245 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Peach + plumtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together163 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Pear + peachtop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together114 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).
Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together10,634 recipes

Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).
Pineapple + peartop 2% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together169 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

Egg white: Acts as a sticky binder that holds the crushed sugar to the fruit surface.
Crushed loaf sugar: Forms the crisp, sweet, frosted coating on the outside of the fruit.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pineapple, pear, peach, plum, orange, egg, sugar):

Vanillafits better
Apricotfits better
Applefits better
Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, pear, peach, plum, orange, egg, 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.