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Pine Apple in a Compote

A compote of sliced pineapple simmered in sugar syrup and finished with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,964 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pine Apple in a Compote

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pineapple

  1. Remove the rind from the pineapple and cut it into slices, not too thin.

Make the syrup

  1. In a saucepan, heat the sugar until it melts.

  2. Add the pineapple slices to the sugar and let them boil gently until the syrup thickens.

Serve

  1. Remove the pineapple from the syrup and place it on a dish.

  2. Mix the juice of the lemons with the syrup and pour it over the pineapple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pineapple
Provides the main fruit body and sweet, tangy flavor for the compote.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, as it melts and thickens with the water, forms the syrup.
Lemons
Their juice adds acidity that balances the sweetness of the sugar and pineapple.

The step that matters

Let the syrup thicken gently. As water evaporates, the sugar becomes more concentrated and the syrup thickens. Boiling too hard or too long can over-concentrate the sugar, scorch it, or break down the pineapple slices.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, lemon. 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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