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Pineapple Sauce

A sweet pineapple sauce thickened with arrowroot and flavored with brandy and lemon juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Arrowroot and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 553 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pineapple Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Simmer the diced pineapple in sugar and water for 10 minutes.

  2. Mix arrowroot with brandy and lemon juice until smooth, then add to the pineapple mixture.

  3. Boil gently for 3 to 4 minutes, stirring constantly until it thickens slightly.

  4. Strain the sauce and serve.

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. Arrowroot + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together553 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Pineapple + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together298 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

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

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

  4. Pineapple + arrowroottop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together31 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  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

Pineapple
Provides the main fruit flavor and body of the sauce.
Arrowroot
Thickens the sauce as it heats, giving it a glossy, smooth texture.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the acidity of the pineapple and lemon.

The step that matters

Adding the arrowroot mixture. Arrowroot must be mixed smooth with liquid first, then stirred into the hot pineapple. Added dry or in lumps, it clumps instead of thickening evenly. Stirring constantly while boiling gently keeps the starch dispersed and lets the sauce thicken smoothly.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy, arrowroot, lemon. 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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