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Pine-apple Tablets

A candy made by boiling pineapple juice with sugar to a crack stage and forming tablets.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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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 ↓

Pine-apple Tablets

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pineapple juice

  1. Cut the pineapple into slices and pound it in a mortar.

  2. Extract the juice through a cloth.

Make the sugar

  1. Boil the sugar until it reaches a crack stage.

  2. Gradually add the pineapple juice as the sugar approaches the crack stage.

  3. Once the sugar is reduced to the right consistency, pour it onto a slab.

  4. Finish as you would for barley-sugar tablets.

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. 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

Sugar
Forms the hard, glassy base of the tablets as it cooks to a crack stage.
Pineapple
Supplies the juice that gives the tablets their flavour.

The step that matters

Adding the pineapple juice as the sugar nears the crack stage. Sugar cooked to the crack stage is very hot and nearly set, so adding juice too early or too late changes the water content and final consistency. Adding it gradually helps the mixture stay even and reach the right hardness.

“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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