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Pine-apple Preserve

A sweet preserve made by simmering sliced pineapples with sugar, cinnamon, and bay leaves until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Pine-apple Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Ensure the pineapples are ripe.

  2. Remove the peel, seeds, and eyes.

  3. Cut each pineapple into 6 slices and layer them in a preserving pan.

  4. Sprinkle each layer with sugar, cinnamon sticks, and bay leaves, using more sugar on the top layer.

Cook the preserve

  1. Simmer over medium heat until the sugar melts, then reduce the heat.

  2. Continue simmering until the pineapple changes color and becomes tender.

  3. Remove the fruit from the syrup and let it drain in a strainer.

  4. Boil the syrup until it thickens, then return the fruit to the syrup.

Bottle and store

  1. Bottle the preserve once cool, checking the syrup every few days for fermentation.

  2. If fermentation occurs, remove the syrup, reboil it, and return the fruit only when ready to finish boiling.

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. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pineapple + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together549 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

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

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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
Provides the fruit that becomes tender and sets the body of the preserve.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and thickens the syrup as it cooks down, helping preserve the fruit.

The step that matters

Boiling the syrup until it thickens. Sugar must be concentrated enough to thicken the syrup and inhibit microbial growth. Undercooked syrup is more likely to ferment, which is why the record calls for checking and reboiling it.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon. 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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