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Pineapple Preserve

A preserve made by cooking pineapple slices with sugar and water until syrupy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 ↓

Pineapple Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Scald the pineapple in boiling water, slicing it into ⅓ inch thick slices through the eyes.

  2. Peel the slices and cut them into cubes, discarding the heart if it is pithy.

  3. Weigh the pineapple cubes and place them in a pot with just enough water to prevent burning, or use a double boiler without water.

  4. Cook until the pineapple is transparent.

Make the syrup

  1. If the fruit is very juicy and thins the syrup, remove the fruit and cook the syrup down until thick.

  2. Make a rich syrup using ½ pound of sugar for every pound of fruit with a little water.

  3. Pour the syrup over the fruit and bring it to a scald.

Seal

  1. Seal the preserve in airtight containers.

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 + 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
Provides the fruit body and flavor that the preserve is built around.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and thickens the syrup, helping it keep.

The step that matters

Cooking the syrup to the right thickness. If juicy fruit thins the syrup, it may stay watery. Cooking the syrup down before rejoining the fruit concentrates the sugar so the preserve sets thick and keeps better.

“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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