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Dessert

Pineapple Ice Cream

A frozen dessert made with cream, sugar, pineapple, and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Pineapple Ice Cream

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the base

  1. Combine 1 pint of cream with half the sugar in a saucepan. Stir until the sugar dissolves, then remove from heat and let cool.

  2. Peel, remove the eyes, cut open, and remove the core of the pineapple. Grate the flesh.

  3. Mix the grated pineapple with the remaining sugar and stir until dissolved.

Churn

  1. Add the remaining pint of cream to the sweetened cream and freeze.

  2. Add lemon juice to the pineapple mixture and stir into the frozen cream. Beat thoroughly.

  3. Turn the crank of the ice cream maker rapidly for 5 minutes, then remove the dasher.

Ripen and finish

  1. Repack the tub, cover, and let it sit for 2 hours to ripen.

  2. If using canned pineapple, add lemon juice to it and stir into the cold cream before freezing.

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. Cream + sugartop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

  5. Cream + pineappletop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,574 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Cream
Provides fat and richness, giving the ice cream a smooth, creamy body.
Sugar
Sweetens the mixture and lowers its freezing point, keeping the ice cream softer.
Pineapple
Supplies the fruit flavour and juice that is stirred into the frozen cream.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the pineapple flavour.

The step that matters

Stirring the pineapple mixture into the frozen cream. Acidic fruit juice can destabilise the fat and proteins in cream, so it may turn grainy or curdle if added carelessly. Beating thoroughly spreads the juice evenly through the cream so the texture stays smooth.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, sugar, pineapple. 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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