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Pine-apple Pudding-sauce

A sweet pineapple sauce for pudding, made by simmering grated pineapple with water and sugar.

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

Make the sauce

  1. Grate enough ripe pineapple to make the desired quantity of sauce.

  2. Simmer the grated pineapple with 2 tablespoons of water until tender.

  3. Gradually mix in 4 oz. of sugar and boil gently for 5 minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. If too sweet, stir in the juice of ½ large lemon before serving.

  2. Pour the sauce over the pudding.

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 fruit flavour and, as it cooks, breaks down into the sauce's body.
Sugar
Sweetens the sauce and, once dissolved and boiled, thickens it into a syrupy consistency.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the flavour of the pineapple.

The step that matters

Gradually mixing in the sugar. Adding sugar slowly to the hot pineapple helps it dissolve fully, so the sauce does not turn grainy or crystallise. Boiling it gently afterwards then gives a smooth, clear syrup.

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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