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Dessert

Hot Pineapple Canapes

A warm canape featuring toasted sponge cake topped with pineapple and a thickened pineapple juice glaze.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 31 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Hot Pineapple Canapes

Ingredients

Directions

Brown the cake

  1. Melt the butter in a chafing dish pan over medium heat.

  2. Add the slices of sponge cake and brown slightly on both sides.

  3. Place the browned slices on a plate and spread each with the chopped pineapple.

Make the sauce

  1. In the same pan, heat the pineapple juice.

  2. Moisten the arrowroot with cold water, then stir it slowly into the hot juice.

  3. Continue stirring until the mixture thickens and becomes clear.

  4. Pour the thickened juice over the cake.

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 + arrowroottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Butter + pineappletop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

  3. Butter + arrowroottop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together610 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Sponge cake
Provides a soft base that soaks up the warm pineapple sauce.
Pineapple juice
Supplies the liquid and sweet fruit flavour for the sauce.
Arrowroot
Thickens the juice into a clear, glossy sauce when heated.
Butter
Adds fat and helps the cake slices brown in the pan.

The step that matters

Stirring the arrowroot into the hot juice. Arrowroot must be dispersed in cold water first and stirred in gently, then kept stirring while it heats. Added lumpy or left unstirred, it clumps instead of thickening smoothly.

Swap the arrowroot

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

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Potatofits better
  3. Sweet potatofits better
  4. Arrowrootthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pineapple. 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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