Name: Pine-apple Preserves
Ingredients: 1 pound fresh pineapple; ½ pound sugar

Why it works: Pineapple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,841 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pine-apple Preserves

Ingredients

1 pound fresh pineapple
½ pound sugar

Directions

Prepare

Pare and slice the pineapple.

Make the preserves

Make a syrup by boiling ½ pound of sugar with 1 pound of pineapple.
Add the pineapple to the boiling syrup and cook until slightly tender.
Fill jars with the hot fruit and pour the syrup over it.
Seal in airtight jars.

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.

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

Pineapple: Forms the fruit body of the preserve and supplies the fruit flavor.
Sugar: Sweetens the dish and, boiled into syrup, helps preserve the fruit.

“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.