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Pine-Apple Tablets

A candy made by boiling pineapple juice with sugar to a crack stage and cooling into 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 juice

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

  2. Extract the juice through a cloth.

Make the candy

  1. Boil the desired amount of sugar until it reaches a crack stage.

  2. Gradually add the pineapple juice to the boiling sugar.

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

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

Pineapple
Supplies the juice that flavours the candy and gives it its fruity acidity.
Sugar
Forms the candy mass and sets firm as the syrup cools, giving it sweetness and structure.

The step that matters

Reducing the sugar to the right consistency. Sugar syrup sets firm as it cools, so stopping the boil too early leaves candy that is soft and sticky, while cooking too far makes it hard and brittle. Adding juice to boiling sugar also makes it bubble and cool the syrup, so the juice should be added gradually while the syrup is still hot.

“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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