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Dessert

Fruit Cup

A chilled fruit salad of grapes, orange, pineapple, with orange juice, pineapple syrup, sugar, and salt, served with maraschino cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and pineapple match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 709 recipes. Both carry 1-hexanal, which smells fruit. The science ↓

Fruit Cup

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove skins and seeds from the white grapes and the membrane from the orange sections.

Mix and freeze

  1. Mix the fruit, orange juice, pineapple syrup, salt, and sugar in a bowl.

  2. Pack the mixture in ice and salt in a freezer.

  3. Stir occasionally until the juice begins to freeze.

Serve

  1. Serve in glasses garnished with Maraschino cherries.

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

    Shared aroma: 1-hexanal (fruit).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Grape + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,771 recipes

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

  4. Syrup + sugartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,842 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, 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

White grapes
Add firm, juicy pieces that give the fruit cup its body and sweetness.
Orange juice
Supplies liquid and acidity, which keeps the mixture bright and helps it freeze into a slush.
Pineapple syrup
Adds sugar and liquid, lowering the freezing point so the mixture stays soft and scoopable.

The step that matters

Stir occasionally until the juice begins to freeze. Stirring breaks up ice crystals as they form, keeping the texture fine and slushy rather than hard and icy. Letting it sit still makes a solid block.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against grape, pineapple, syrup, 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.

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