Name: Compote of Pineapple
Ingredients: 1 pineapple; 5 ounces lump sugar; ½ pint water

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 ↓

Compote of Pineapple

Ingredients

1 pineapple
5 ounces lump sugar
½ pint water

Directions

Prepare the pineapple

Peel the pineapple and remove all the eyes.
Cut it into slices ½ inch thick, keeping one slice whole and halving the rest.

Make the syrup and poach

Boil the sugar in water for 10 minutes to make syrup.
Add the pineapple slices to the syrup and boil for 5 minutes.
Leave the slices in the syrup until completely cool.

Arrange and serve

Drain the slices and place the whole slice in the center of a compote dish.
Arrange the half slices in a circle around the whole slice.
Pour the syrup over the pineapple and serve.

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: Provides the fruit flavour and the main body of the compote.
Lump sugar: Dissolves in the water to form the syrup that sweetens 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.