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Dessert

Banana and Orange Salad

A chilled fruit salad of oranges, bananas, pineapple juice, lemon, sugar, and egg white.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 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 ↓

Banana and Orange Salad

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and cut four oranges and the bananas into small pieces.

Make the dressing and serve

  1. Mix the lemon juice, sugar, and beaten egg white with the juice of the two remaining oranges.

  2. Add the pineapple juice last.

  3. Serve cold.

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. Banana + pineappletop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

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

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Orange + bananatop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  5. Lemon + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Egg white
Beaten white adds light body and a foamy, airy texture to the dressing.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the sharp citrus juices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the fruit.
Bananas
Add soft texture and natural sweetness and moisture to the salad.
Oranges
Provide juice for the dressing and fresh citrus acidity and aroma.
Pineapple juice
Adds moisture and extra fruity sweetness to the dressing.

The step that matters

Mixing the beaten egg white into the juice. Beaten egg white is delicate and can deflate or clump when stirred into acidic, sugared juice. Mixing gently keeps it airy and evenly distributed through the dressing.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Bananathe original

Fit is the average pairing score against orange, lemon, pineapple, sugar, egg. 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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