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Pine-apple Pudding-sauce

A sweet pineapple sauce made by simmering grated pineapple with water and sugar, optionally flavored with lemon.

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 the flesh of the pineapple after removing the rind.

  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 more minutes.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the pudding.

  2. For a finer sauce, simmer ½ pound of pineapple in its own juice with 1 tablespoon of water, then mix with 7 oz. of sifted sugar and boil until clear.

  3. If too sweet, stir in the juice of ½ lemon 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. 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, once cooked down, the body of the sauce.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and, when boiled, thickens the sauce into a glossy syrup.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity to balance sweetness, used optionally to correct a sauce that is too sweet.

The step that matters

Boiling in the sugar. Sugar must be fully dissolved and the sauce boiled gently for the full time so it reaches a stable, clear syrup. Boiling too hard can scorch sugar or over-reduce the sauce.

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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