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
Cut the pineapple into slices.
Pound the slices in a mortar and extract the juice through a cloth.
Make the tablet
Boil the sugar until it reaches a crack stage.
Gradually add the pineapple juice to the boiling sugar.
Once combined and reduced to the right consistency, pour it onto a slab.
Finish as you would for barley-sugar tablets.
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.
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Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked 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
- Provides the flavour and the juice that becomes the body of the tablet.
- Sugar
- Boiled to a crack stage, it sets into a hard, brittle glass when cooled.
The step that matters
Boiling the sugar to the crack stage. Sugar must reach the right temperature to set hard when cooled. Too little boiling leaves the tablet sticky, while overboiling makes it bitter and brittle. Adding the juice gradually keeps the mixture from spattering and lets it reduce evenly to the right consistency.
“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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