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Dessert

Orange Compote, with Pineapple

A fruit compote made with tinned pineapple, sugar, optional liqueur, and optional bananas.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and banana match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 733 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Orange Compote, with Pineapple

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Slice the tinned pineapple.

  2. Layer the pineapple slices in a dish, alternating with other ingredients.

  3. Add one or two sliced bananas if desired.

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the syrup from the pineapple with a little sugar.

  2. Optionally, flavor with rum, brandy, or any liqueur.

Assemble

  1. Pour the syrup over the layered fruit.

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 + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Pineapple + rumtop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Rum + bananatop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together183 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Sugar + rumtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,908 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Tinned pineapple
Provides the main fruit and the syrup that flavors the compote.
Sugar
Sweetens the boiled syrup and balances the fruit's acidity.

Swap the banana

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Bananathe original
  3. Mangofits about as well
  4. Strawberryfits less well

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