Skip to main content
Drink

Fruit Cocktails

A chilled mixed fruit beverage featuring strawberries, cantaloupe, raspberries, grapefruit, and maraschino cherries, served with pineapple sherbet and optional sherry.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pineapple and grapefruit work together. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 95 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Fruit Cocktails

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the strawberries

  1. Wash and cap the strawberries, then sprinkle them with sugar and let them stand for 1 hour.

  2. Mash the strawberries finely and place them in cocktail glasses.

Assemble and serve

  1. Serve with a spoonful of green-colored pineapple sherbet.

  2. Use a vegetable scoop to cut balls from the cantaloupe and fill half of it, cutting it into points.

  3. Add pink raspberries in claret syrup, and small pieces of grapefruit with maraschino cherries.

  4. Drizzle a little sherry on top for added flavor if desired.

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. Pineapple + grapefruittop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together95 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + syruptop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Grapefruit + sherrytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together37 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Pineapple + syruptop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together568 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Strawberries
Provide the main fruit base, and sugar draws out their juice as they stand.
Sugar
Sweetens the strawberries and draws out their juice during the standing time.
Pineapple sherbet
Adds a cold, sweet, creamy contrast to the fruit.
Sherry
Adds a little aroma and flavor on top, used only if desired.

Swap the grapefruit

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Grapefruitthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pineapple, syrup, sherry. 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 SyrupOrange Syrup47 recipesPineapple LemonadePineapple Lemonade18 recipesPineapple PunchPineapple Punch18 recipesOrgeat SyrupOrgeat Syrup13 recipes