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Dessert

Pineapple Pie

A pie made with grated pineapple, sugar, flour, lard, and ice water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 92,116 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Pineapple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

Make the filling

  1. Pare and grate the pineapple.

  2. Mix the grated pineapple with the sugar.

Make the crust

  1. In a bowl, combine the flour and lard, chopping until fine.

  2. Add enough ice water to make a soft dough.

  3. Roll out the dough for the pie crust.

Assemble and bake

  1. Fill the pie with the pineapple mixture and cover with another crust.

  2. Bake for 30 minutes.

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. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  2. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

  3. Pineapple + flourtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,209 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Pineapple
Provides the main filling, with juice and fruit that set the pie's moisture and tartness.
Sugar
Sweetens the filling and balances the sharpness of the pineapple.
Flour
Forms the structure of the crust once mixed with liquid and baked.
Lard
Adds fat that keeps the crust tender and helps create flaky layers.
Ice water
Hydrates the flour so the dough holds together without becoming tough.

The step that matters

Adding the ice water. Too much water over-develops gluten and makes the crust tough, while too little leaves it crumbly and hard to roll. Keeping the water icy keeps the lard solid, which helps the crust stay flaky.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour. 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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