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Dessert

Banana and Orange Salad

A fruit salad of bananas and oranges dressed with a boiled lemon, sugar, egg white, pineapple juice mixture.

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 the fruit

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

Make the sauce

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

  2. Bring the mixture to a boil, then strain it.

Assemble and serve

  1. Pour the strained mixture over the fruit.

  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

Oranges
Provide the main fruit and juice, giving the salad its sweet-tart flavor.
Bananas
Add soft, sweet pieces of fruit that give the salad body.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor and balances the sugar.
Sugar
Sweetens the dressing and balances the acidity of the citrus juices.
Egg white
Thickens slightly when heated, giving the sauce more body.
Pineapple juice
Adds extra fruit juice and sweetness to the finished salad.

The step that matters

Boiling the egg white mixture. Heating beaten egg white sets its proteins, and overheating can make it grainy or lumpy. Bringing the mixture to a boil and then straining it removes any cooked bits so the sauce stays smooth.

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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