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Pineapple Preserve

A sweet pineapple preserve made by boiling pineapple slices in sugar syrup and layering with additional sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 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 Preserve

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the fruit

  1. Peel the pineapple thickly, removing all black spots, and slice it into ¼‑inch thick slices.

Make the syrup and preserve

  1. In a saucepan, combine ½ pound of sugar with ½ cup of water to make a syrup.

  2. Add the pineapple slices to the syrup and boil for 10 minutes.

  3. Carefully remove the slices with a spoon and place them in a jar.

  4. Pour the syrup over the pineapple slices and let them stand for 2 days.

  5. After 2 days, drain the syrup, add another ¼ pound of sugar, and boil it again without the fruit.

  6. Pour the hot syrup over the pineapple slices as before.

  7. Repeat this process after another 2 days, adding ¼ pound of sugar to the syrup again.

  8. Once cooled, the preserve is ready for use. Store in an airtight container.

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

Pineapple
Provides the fruit that softens and turns tender and translucent as it cooks in the syrup.
Sugar
Sweetens the fruit and, at high concentration in the syrup, helps preserve it for storage.

The step that matters

Repeated syrup soaking and reboiling. Sugar syrup must be reboiled and poured hot over the fruit each time so the sugar concentration rises and the fruit fully absorbs it. Skipping or cooling the syrup weakens the preserving effect.

“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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