Skip to main content
Dessert

Pineapple Pie

A fruit pie with a buttery crust filled with pineapple and topped with whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 41,516 recipes. Both carry delta-dodecalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Pineapple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the crust

  1. Combine flour and butter in a bowl and chop until butter is in pea-sized pieces.

  2. Add enough ice water to form a crumbly dough.

  3. Handle the dough with a fork and press it together on a board using a rolling pin.

  4. Fold the dough in thirds and roll it out again; repeat this process.

  5. Roll the dough to fit your pie pan, prick the bottom with a fork, and bake until golden.

Fill and finish

  1. Fill the baked crust with pineapple; if too juicy, thicken with cornstarch and add butter.

  2. Once cooled, whip the cream until stiff, sweeten to taste, and cover the pie.

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. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + sugartop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  5. Butter + pineappletop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Forms the structure of the crust once mixed with water.
Butter
Pea-sized pieces create flaky layers as they melt in the oven.
Cornstarch
Thickens the pineapple juices so the filling holds its shape when sliced.
Cream
Whipped until stiff, it adds a light, airy topping to the pie.

The step that matters

Keeping butter in pea-sized pieces. If the butter is worked in too fully, it blends into the flour and the crust turns tough rather than flaky. Cold, distinct butter pieces melt during baking and leave steam pockets that separate the layers.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Coconutfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, butter, cream, sugar. 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.

You might also like

Pineapple SherbetPineapple Sherbet116 recipesPineapple PuddingPineapple Pudding72 recipesPineapple CreamPineapple Cream58 recipesPineapple JellyPineapple Jelly39 recipes