Name: Pineapple Sauce
Ingredients: 1 pineapple, finely chopped; Sugar, to taste; Arrowroot, for thickening

Why it works: Pineapple and arrowroot share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 31 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Pineapple Sauce

Ingredients

1 pineapple, finely chopped
Sugar, to taste
Arrowroot, for thickening

Directions

Finely chop the pineapple.
Sweeten the pineapple to taste.
Thicken the mixture with arrowroot.

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.

Pineapple + arrowroottop 13% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together31 recipes

Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).
Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together4,841 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Sugar + arrowroottop 20% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,073 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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 body and natural sweetness and tartness for the sauce.
Arrowroot: Thickens the juices into a glossy sauce as it is heated.