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Pine-apple Pudding-sauce

A sweet pineapple sauce made by simmering grated pineapple with water and sugar, optionally flavored with lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 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 ↓

Pine-apple Pudding-sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Grate the flesh of a ripe pineapple, removing the rind.

  2. Simmer the grated pineapple with 2 tablespoons of water until tender, about 10 to 15 minutes.

  3. Gradually mix in ½ cup of sugar and boil gently for 5 more minutes.

  4. For a finer sauce, simmer ½ pound of pineapple in its own juice with 1 tablespoon of water, then mix with 7 oz of sifted sugar and boil until clear.

  5. If too sweet, stir in the strained juice of ½ lemon before serving.

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 main flavour and, once simmered, the soft body of the sauce.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and thickens it as it boils down into a syrupy texture.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that balances sweetness and brightens the pineapple flavour.

The step that matters

Boiling the sugar into the pineapple. Adding sugar and boiling too hard or too long can over-thicken or caramelise the sauce. Gentle boiling dissolves the sugar evenly and lets the sauce thicken smoothly as water evaporates.

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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