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Pine-apple Preserve

A sweet preserve made by simmering sliced pineapples with sugar, cinnamon, and bay leaves until tender.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cinnamon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 30,779 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Pine-apple Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Remove the peel from the pineapples, cutting deeply to remove all seeds and eyes.

  2. Cut each pineapple into six slices and layer them in a preserving pan.

  3. Sprinkle a good quantity of sugar over each layer, adding a few cinnamon sticks and bay leaves, and cover the top layer with more sugar.

Cook the preserve

  1. Simmer over medium heat until the sugar melts, then reduce the heat and continue simmering until the pineapples change color and become tender.

  2. Remove the fruit from the syrup and let it drain in a colander, while continuing to boil the syrup until it thickens.

  3. Return the fruit to the syrup and finish boiling.

Bottle and store

  1. Bottle the preserve when cool, checking the syrup every few days for fermentation.

  2. If it ferments, reboil the syrup before sealing.

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. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  2. Pineapple + cinnamontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together549 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  3. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Pineapples
Provide the fruit that softens and turns tender in the sugar syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the preserve and, as a thick syrup, helps preserve the fruit.
Cinnamon sticks
Add warm, aromatic spice flavor to the syrup and fruit.
Bay leaves
Contribute a subtle herbal aroma to the syrup.

The step that matters

Continue simmering until the pineapples change color and become tender. Sugar draws water out of the fruit and into the syrup, so the pineapple must cook long enough for the sugar to penetrate and soften the flesh. Reboiling the syrup to a thicker consistency helps it hold together and resist fermentation.

Swap the pineapple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cinnamon. 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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