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Rhubarb and Pineapple Marmalade

A preserve made from pineapple and rhubarb with sugar, boiled until clear.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and rhubarb share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 56 recipes. Both carry methyl cinnamate, which smells strawberry. The science ↓

Rhubarb and Pineapple Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine pineapple and 2 cups of sugar in a porcelain or granite pan and let it sit overnight.

  2. In a separate pan, combine rhubarb and 5 cups of sugar and let it sit overnight.

  3. Strain the juice from both mixtures.

Cook

  1. Boil the juice for 20 minutes.

  2. Add the pineapple to the juice and boil for 15 minutes.

  3. Add the rhubarb and boil until the mixture is clear.

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 + rhubarbtop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together56 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  2. Sugar + rhubarbtop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. 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
Adds sweet, tropical flavor and fruit pieces to the marmalade.
Rhubarb
Adds tart flavor and body as the fruit softens during boiling.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out its juice during the overnight rest.

The step that matters

Boil until the mixture is clear. Boiling the juice first concentrates it and dissolves the sugar. Stopping too early leaves the marmalade thin, while long boiling can darken the fruit and make it stiff.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Quincefits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, rhubarb. 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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