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Dessert

Pineapple Candy

A candied confection made from sugar, water, cream of tartar, and pineapple oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Pineapple Candy

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. In a large pot, combine the sugar, cream of tartar, and water.

  2. Boil the mixture until it cracks in a tumbler of water.

Cool and flavor

  1. Pour the hot candy onto a marble surface to cool.

  2. Flavor the candy with pineapple oil while it cools.

Pull and shape

  1. Once cool, pull the candy until it becomes porous.

  2. Shape the candy into a round cake and color the top with food coloring.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Sugar + pineappletop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

  3. Cream + pineappletop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,574 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

White sugar
Forms the candy's structure and provides all of its sweetness.
Cream of tartar
Acidity helps prevent the sugar from crystallizing, keeping the candy smooth.
Pineapple oil
Supplies the pineapple aroma and flavor.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture cracks in water. The sugar must be cooked to the right concentration. Stopping too early leaves the candy soft and sticky, while cooking too long makes it brittle and hard to pull.

Swap the pineapple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, cream):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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