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Dessert

Pineapple Parfait

A chilled dessert of whipped cream, pineapple, sugar, and lemon juice, set in a mold and frozen.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Cream and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Pineapple Parfait

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Whip the cream with the sugar until stiff.

  2. Cook the grated pineapple with the sugar until thin, then let it cool.

Make the parfait

  1. Add the cooled pineapple and lemon juice to the whipped cream.

  2. Continue beating until well blended.

  3. Turn the mixture into a mold and pack it in equal measures of ice and salt for 3 hours.

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

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

  2. Pineapple + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Cream + pineappletop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,574 recipes

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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

Heavy cream
Whipped into a foam that gives the parfait its light, airy structure.
Grated pineapple
Adds fruit flavor and moisture, and its juice thins the mixture before blending.
Granulated sugar
Sweetens the dish and helps stabilize the whipped cream while softening the frozen texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the pineapple flavor and balances the sweetness.

The step that matters

Let the pineapple cool before adding it to the cream. Warm pineapple would melt and deflate the whipped cream's air bubbles, so the mixture would turn thin and dense instead of light and fluffy.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Bananafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cream, pineapple, 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.

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