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Dessert

Pine Apple-jelly

A gelatinous pineapple preserve made with pineapple juice, lemon juice, sugar, and fruit pieces.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and banana match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 733 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Pine Apple-jelly

Ingredients

Directions

Make the jelly

  1. Soak the gelatine in 1 cup of water.

  2. Add enough hot water to make a total of 1 quart.

  3. Stir in 1 cup of sugar, the juice of the sliced pineapple, and the juice of the lemons.

  4. Strain the mixture into a dish to cool.

Set and serve

  1. When it begins to thicken, add the small pieces of pineapple and the candied cherries or sliced bananas.

  2. Serve with whipped cream if desired.

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 + bananatop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together733 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

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

  4. Lemon + bananatop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

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

Gelatine
Sets the liquid into a firm, wobbly jelly as it cools.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the tartness of the juices.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the pineapple flavour.
Pineapple juice
Provides the main fruit flavour of the jelly.

The step that matters

Add the fruit only when the jelly begins to thicken. Gelatine sets as it cools. If the fruit goes in while the mixture is still too liquid, the pieces sink or float unevenly instead of staying suspended in the set jelly.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, pineapple, banana, cream. 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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