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Preserved Pine-apple

A preserved pineapple made by boiling pineapple slices with sugar and lemon, then jarred with syrup.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 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 ↓

Preserved Pine-apple

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pineapple

  1. Peel the pineapples and cut them into thick slices, removing the core.

  2. Weigh the slices and use an equal weight of loaf sugar.

Make the syrup and cook

  1. Dissolve the sugar in a small amount of water and heat it in a preserving kettle.

  2. Boil the sugar solution for 10 minutes, skimming off any foam.

  3. Add the pineapple slices and boil until they are clear and soft, about 30 minutes.

Jar and seal

  1. Let the slices cool in a large dish before transferring them to jars.

  2. Pour the syrup over the pineapple slices and seal the jars with brandy paper.

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

Pineapples
Provide the fruit that softens and turns clear as it cooks in syrup.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at this weight, preserves it by drawing out water.

The step that matters

Boiling the pineapple until clear and soft. Sugar must penetrate the fruit gradually; boiling too hard or too briefly can leave slices tough, cloudy or insufficiently syrup-infused, and the sugar concentration determines how well the preserve keeps.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against 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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