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Pineapple Marmalade

A preserved pineapple spread made by boiling pineapple with sugar and optional lemon juice.

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

Pineapple Marmalade

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Combine the grated pineapple and half of the sugar in a bowl, then let it sit overnight to extract the juice.

Make the marmalade

  1. Boil the mixture for a short time.

  2. Let it stand for two to three days.

  3. Boil the mixture again with another third of the sugar.

  4. Let it stand for another day or two.

  5. Boil the mixture with the remaining sugar until thick.

  6. Add lemon juice if desired for acidity.

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. Pineapple + sugartop 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

Pineapple
Provides the fruit body and natural pectin-bearing pulp that gives the marmalade its base.
Refined loaf sugar
Sweetens the marmalade and, as it concentrates through boiling, helps it thicken and preserve.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the flavour and supports setting.

The step that matters

Boiling in stages with resting between. Boiling concentrates the sugar and fruit gradually, and resting lets the juice extract and the mixture set. Boiling too long at once can scorch the sugar or overcook the fruit, so each boil should be brief until the final thickening.

Swap the lemon

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pineapple, sugar. 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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