Name: Pineapples for the Table
Ingredients: 1 ripe pineapple; fine white sugar

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 ↓

Pineapples for the Table

Ingredients

1 ripe pineapple
fine white sugar

Directions

Prepare the fruit

Pare the pineapple and remove the eyes.
Cut the fruit into small pieces, avoiding slicing.
Discard the core as it is indigestible.

Sugar and chill

Place the pieces in a glass dish and cover with fine white sugar.
Set the dish on ice until ready to 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

Ripe pineapple: Provides the main fruit and its juice, which combines with the sugar into a syrup.
Fine white sugar: Adds sweetness and draws moisture out of the fruit, helping form a syrup.

“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.