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Drink

Pineapple Shrub

A chilled pineapple drink made by steeping pineapple pieces in boiling water with sugar, served over ice.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Pineapple and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,841 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Pineapple Shrub

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Pare and cut fresh pineapples into small pieces.

  2. Place the pineapple pieces in a dish and sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Steep

  1. Pour 2 quarts of boiling water over the pineapple.

  2. Cover the dish until it cools, pressing the fruit occasionally.

  3. Set the dish on ice.

Serve

  1. Serve with additional sugar and chopped ice.

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 + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 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

Pineapples
Provide the main fruit flavor and juice that the shrub is built on.
Powdered sugar
Sweetens the fruit and draws out its juice as it dissolves.

The step that matters

Covering the dish while the fruit cools in boiling water. Heat and time pull flavor and juice from the pineapple, and covering traps the aroma. Leaving the dish uncovered lets flavor escape and can cool the fruit too quickly to steep fully.

“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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