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Pine-apple Sauce

A sweet pineapple sauce made with sugar, water, arrowroot, pineapple, lemon and orange juice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Pine-apple Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Boil sugar and water together until dissolved.

  2. Thicken with arrowroot mixed in a little cold water.

  3. Remove from heat and let cool slightly.

  4. Stir in grated pineapple, lemon juice, and orange juice.

Serve

  1. Serve as a pudding sauce.

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. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

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

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pineapple + orangetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,664 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  4. Arrowroot + orangetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Provides sweetness and body to the syrup base of the sauce.
Arrowroot
Thickens the liquid into a glossy sauce when heated.
Grated pineapple
Adds fruit flavor and pulpy texture to the sauce.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness of the sauce.
Orange juice
Adds citrus sweetness and aroma to the sauce.

The step that matters

Thicken with arrowroot mixed in a little cold water. Arrowroot must be dispersed in cold water before it goes into hot liquid, otherwise it clumps. It thickens when heated and loses some thickening power if boiled for long or combined with acid for too long.

Swap the pineapple

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

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

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