Skip to main content
Dessert

Pineapple Bowl

A chilled pineapple dessert soaked in sugar and wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sherry and champagne share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 61 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Pineapple Bowl

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. In a deep bowl, combine the sliced pineapple with the fine sugar.

  2. Let it sit for 3 hours.

Add wine and serve

  1. Pour the sherry, Rhenish wine, and champagne over the pineapple.

  2. Allow it to stand for a short time 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. Sherry + champagnetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together61 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Pineapple + champagnetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together97 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  3. Pineapple + sherrytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together228 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Wine + champagnetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together172 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  5. Pineapple + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together325 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fine sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out its juices, forming a syrup with the pineapple.
Pineapple
Provides the fruit base, flavour and juices that mingle with the wine.
Sherry
Adds fortified wine body and nutty, sweet-dry flavour to the bowl.
Rhenish wine
Contributes light, fruity acidity and floral aroma to the liquid.
Champagne
Adds carbonation and bright acidity for a lively, effervescent finish.

The step that matters

Letting the pineapple sit with sugar. Sugar must have time to draw juice out of the fruit and dissolve into a syrup. Adding wine too early leaves the sugar gritty and the flavours unbalanced.

Swap the pineapple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, sherry, wine, champagne):

  1. Pineapplethe original
  2. Strawberryfits about as well
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Vanillafits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, sherry, wine, champagne. 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.

You might also like

Pineapple SherbetPineapple Sherbet116 recipesPineapple PuddingPineapple Pudding72 recipesPineapple CreamPineapple Cream58 recipesPineapple JellyPineapple Jelly39 recipes