Name: Pineapple Pudding
Ingredients: stale sponge cake; 1 large pineapple; sugar

Why it works: Pineapple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,841 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pineapple Pudding

Ingredients

stale sponge cake
1 large pineapple
sugar

Directions

Prepare

Butter a pudding dish.
Line the bottom and sides with slices of stale sponge cake.

Assemble

Pare and thinly slice the pineapple.
Layer the pineapple in the dish, sprinkling sugar between layers until all is used.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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.

Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,841 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

Stale sponge cake: Forms the lining that holds the pudding together and soaks up the pineapple juices.
Pineapple: Provides the main fruit flavour, moisture and tartness that softens as it sits.
Sugar: Sweetens the pineapple layers and draws out some of its juice.

“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.