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Dessert

Pineapple Ice

A frozen dessert made from pineapple, orange and lemon juices, sugar syrup, and beaten egg whites.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Orange and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Pineapple Ice

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil water and sugar together for 20 minutes to make a syrup.

  2. Add orange juice and lemon juice to the syrup.

Cool and strain

  1. Cool the mixture.

  2. Strain the mixture to remove all juice except for the pineapple.

Freeze and finish

  1. Freeze the mixture.

  2. When partly frozen, fold in the beaten egg whites.

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. Orange + lemontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Orange + pineappletop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Lemon + pineappletop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,964 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Lemon + eggtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together44,316 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e,e)-2,4-decadienal (fatty, deep fried).

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
Sweetens the mixture and, dissolved in boiling water, forms the syrup base that keeps the frozen texture soft.
Egg whites
Beaten whites trap air, giving the ice cream a lighter, fluffier texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and sharpens the sweetness.
Orange juice
Adds sweetness and citrus aroma, rounding out the sharp lemon.
Grated pineapple
Supplies the main fruit flavour and fine pineapple pieces throughout the frozen mixture.

The step that matters

Fold in the beaten egg whites when partly frozen. If the mixture is fully frozen it will not blend evenly with the whites, and if it is still liquid the whites will deflate. Folding gently keeps the air trapped in the whites, which gives a light texture.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Blueberryfits about as well
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, orange, lemon, egg. 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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