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Dessert

Preserved Pineapples

Preserved pineapples are pineapples boiled in sugar syrup, optionally with lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,964 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Preserved Pineapples

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Peel the pineapples and remove the eyes and hard center.

  2. Slice the pineapples.

Cook the fruit

  1. Boil the sliced pineapples until tender, then skim the liquid.

  2. Add ¾ pound of sugar for every pound of pineapple.

  3. Boil the mixture, then skim it again.

  4. Add the fruit.

Finish

  1. Boil until the mixture is clear and soft.

  2. Add lemon juice and 1 pound of sugar.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 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
Provide the fruit that softens during cooking and becomes tender and translucent in the syrup.
Sugar
Adds sweetness, thickens the syrup and helps preserve the fruit by drawing out its water.
Lemon
Adds acidity that brightens the flavor of the sweet syrup. Optional in the record.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture is clear and soft. Sugar syrup gradually replaces the water in the fruit, which is what makes it clear and firm enough to keep. Stopping too early leaves it cloudy and wet, while boiling too hard can scorch the sugar and darken the fruit.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Bananafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, sugar. 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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