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Pineapple Preserves

A sweet preserve made by boiling pineapple with water and sugar until the fruit is tender and the syrup thickens.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Pineapple Preserves

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove the top and bottom of the pineapples and peel off the rough skin.

  2. Weigh the pineapples and cut them into slices, chips, or quarters.

Cook the fruit and syrup

  1. For each pound of fruit, add ½ cup of water to a preserving kettle and bring to a gentle boil until the fruit is tender and clear.

  2. Remove the fruit using a fork or skimmer and place it in a dish.

  3. Add 1 pound of sugar for each pound of fruit to the water and stir until dissolved.

  4. Return the pineapple to the kettle, cover, and boil gently until transparent throughout.

  5. Remove the fruit and let it cool, then place it in glass jars.

  6. Simmer the syrup until thick and rich, then pour it over the fruit.

Seal

  1. Seal the jars the next day.

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 + 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

Pineapples
Provide the fruit that becomes tender and turns transparent as it cooks in the syrup.
White sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, when boiled into syrup, thickens it and helps the fruit turn clear.

The step that matters

Boil the fruit gently until transparent throughout. Boiling hard can break the pineapple apart and cloud the syrup. Gentle heat lets sugar slowly penetrate the fruit so it becomes clear and holds its shape.

“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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