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To Preserve Pine-apples

A method of preserving pineapples by sugaring, boiling, and cooling them in syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and ginger work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 559 recipes. Both carry methyl 2-methylbutyrate, which smells fruity, apple. The science ↓

To Preserve Pine-apples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel and slice the pineapples.

  2. Cover the slices with an equal weight of sugar and let them sit for a day or night.

  3. Remove the pineapples.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the syrup until it simmers.

  2. Add the pineapples back to the syrup.

  3. Boil for 15 minutes.

  4. Remove the pineapples.

  5. Continue boiling the syrup until both are cool.

  6. Pour the cooled syrup over the pineapples.

  7. Boil white ginger in the syrup.

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 + gingertop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together559 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl 2-methylbutyrate (fruity, apple).

  2. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Pineapples
The main fruit, which absorbs the sugar syrup and becomes the preserve.
Loaf sugar
Draws water out of the fruit and forms a thick syrup that sweetens and preserves it.
White ginger
Adds a warm, spicy aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup in stages. Sugar draws moisture out of the pineapple, and boiling thickens the syrup as water evaporates. Removing the fruit before the long boil and letting the syrup cool before pouring lets the sugar penetrate gradually, so the fruit keeps its shape and the syrup does not scorch or crystallise.

Swap the ginger

The recipe marks ginger as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, pineapple):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Gingerthe original
  3. Peppermintfits less well
  4. Corianderfits less well

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

More preserved pineapple recipes

Chips 3 See all 35 →

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