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Dessert

Pineapple Hash

A fruit hash made by stuffing a pineapple hull with chopped bananas, oranges, and pineapple, sweetened with powdered sugar and topped with grated coconut.

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

Pineapple Hash

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Cut off the top 3 inches of the pineapple and scoop out the inside, being careful not to break the rind.

  2. Remove the core and chop the pulp coarsely.

  3. Slice the bananas and oranges thinly.

  4. Chop all the fruit into bits.

Assemble and serve

  1. Sweeten the mixture with 1 cup of powdered sugar.

  2. Stuff the pineapple hull with the fruit mixture.

  3. Cover the pineapple hull with grated coconut.

  4. Place the top back on the hull.

  5. Serve in punch glasses.

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. Banana + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together549 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Pineapple + coconuttop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together651 recipes

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

  4. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Banana + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,118 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Its pulp and juice make up the bulk of the dish and its rind serves as the serving vessel.
Bananas
Add soft body and mild sweetness to the fruit mixture.
Oranges
Add acidity and juice that brighten the sweet fruit mixture.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the fruit and dissolves readily into its juices.

The step that matters

Scoop out the pineapple without breaking the rind. The rind is the only container for the filling, so a cracked shell will leak juice and lose the fruit mixture.

Swap the orange

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Mangofits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Orangethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, banana, sugar, coconut. 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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