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Dessert

Tinned Fine-apple Trifle

A chilled trifle made with tinned pineapple, cream, sugar, lemon essence, and garnished with cherries.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pine and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 4% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 480 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Tinned Fine-apple Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pineapple

  1. Open the tin of pineapple and strain off the juice.

  2. Place the fruit in a mortar and mix with caster sugar.

  3. Pound until smooth, then pass through a fine sieve.

  4. Beat the juice back into the pulp.

Make the cream

  1. Sweeten the cream to taste with caster sugar.

  2. Flavor the cream with essence of lemon.

Assemble and serve

  1. Layer the pineapple pulp in a glass dish.

  2. Top with cream.

  3. Garnish with half cherries.

  4. Serve immediately.

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. Pine + lemontop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together480 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Apple + lemontop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,551 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  4. Pine + appletop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Apple + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together16,478 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Apple and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 16,478 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 (in the method)
Provides the fruit flavour and the main body of the trifle layer.
Rich cream
Adds richness and a smooth, soft texture to the topping.
Caster sugar
Sweetens the pineapple pulp and the cream.

The step that matters

Pound until smooth, then pass through a fine sieve. Pounding and sieving break the fruit fibres down into a smooth pulp. Skipping the sieve leaves stringy or grainy bits that spoil the texture of the layer under the cream.

Swap the apple

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

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

Fit is the average pairing score against pine, sugar, cream, 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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