MENJAWAB PERTANYAAN - العربية القياسية

Such a basic question (with such a bad post title), but I can’t help wondering – what’s the best/usual way to talk about what food is made of?

I’d assumed that an iḍāfah construction would be the way to go, if only because that seems to cover such a conveniently huge number of possibilities in Arabic grammar.

However, I’ve also seen similar constructions with بـ in a French-Arabic dictionary. I’d seen it used in e.g. ‘tea with mint’ = شاي بالنعناع, that is, with something added to something else, but when I saw فطيرة بالتفاح, I got puzzled.

I also realised that the ingredients in both the iḍāfah or the بـ examples I did find seemed to bear the definite article most often than not – e.g. فطيرة (بـ)ـالتفاح –, even in contexs I wouldn’t have expected them to, so I also started wondering whether that might have anything to do with collective nouns and/or the ‘generic sense’ of ingredients.

(Hans Wehr, for instance, has them all definite in the entry on عصير ‎–‎ عصير البرتغال‎, عصير الطماطم‎, عصير الفاكهة and عصير الليمون ‎–, which made me more confident about my such impression.)

So, to sum up: a) indefinite or definite iḍāfah, according to context; b) definite iḍāfah in all cases; c) construction with بـ; d) some other construction; or e) it depends?

TIA!