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Dessert

Canned Pine-apple

A preserved pineapple in syrup, optionally flavored with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Pineapple and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,964 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Canned Pine-apple

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the syrup

  1. Slice the pineapple thinly and cut the slices in half.

  2. Make a syrup by boiling 5 pounds of sugar with 1 pint of water.

Cook and pack

  1. Cook the pineapple in the boiling syrup until tender.

  2. Pack the pineapple in jars with plenty of syrup.

  3. Add lemon juice to the syrup if desired.

Seal and store

  1. Screw the jar tops on tightly and store in a cool, dark place.

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 + lemontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

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

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

Sugar and lemon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Forms the syrup that sweetens the pineapple and helps preserve its texture and flavour.
Pineapple
Provides the fruit that is cooked until tender and packed in the syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour of the syrup.

Swap the lemon

The recipe marks lemon as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, pineapple):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Bananafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pineapple. 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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