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Dessert

Pineapple Snow

A chilled pineapple dessert thickened with corn starch and folded with beaten egg whites, served with sweetened whipped cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and corn work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 150 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pineapple Snow

Ingredients

Directions

Make the pineapple base

  1. Drain the syrup from the can of pineapple.

  2. Bring the syrup to a boil.

  3. Mix corn starch with a little cold pineapple juice.

  4. Stir the mixture into the boiling syrup.

  5. Mash the pineapple fruit to a pulp.

  6. Stir the pulp into the thickened juice.

Finish and serve

  1. Beat the egg whites until stiff.

  2. Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the mixture.

  3. Pour the mixture into a mold.

  4. Set the mold on ice.

  5. Serve with sweetened whipped cream.

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 + corntop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together150 recipes

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

  2. Egg + creamtop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together42,166 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

  3. Pineapple + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,574 recipes

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

  4. Corn + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-heptanol (bitter, floral).

  5. Corn + eggtop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,484 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Egg and cream barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 42,166 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

Corn starch
Thickens the pineapple juice into a smooth, stable base when heated.
Egg whites
Whipped into foam, they lighten the mixture and give the snow its airy texture.
Pineapple
Provides the main fruit flavour and, once mashed, body to the mixture.
Whipped cream
Adds richness and a soft, creamy contrast to the light, tart base.

The step that matters

Gently fold the beaten egg whites into the mixture.. Egg white foam holds air only if it is not deflated. Stirring vigorously knocks out the bubbles, so the snow sets dense instead of light and airy.

Swap the pineapple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against corn, egg, cream. 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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