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Dessert

Fruit Trifle

A layered dessert of pineapple, sugar, water, stale plain cake, and whipped cream or boiled custard.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and cream are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 43,450 recipes. Both carry 2,3-butanedione, which smells butter, sweet. The science ↓

Fruit Trifle

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pineapple

  1. Peel the pineapple thickly.

  2. Cut the pineapple into rounds.

  3. Cut the pineapple rounds into small squares.

  4. Remove the hard center of the pineapple squares.

Cook the fruit

  1. Combine the pineapple, sugar, and water in an enamel bowl.

  2. Simmer the mixture gently until the pineapple is tender.

Assemble and serve

  1. Layer the fruit in a glass dish.

  2. Layer a piece of stale plain cake over the fruit.

  3. Repeat the fruit and cake layers until the dish is full.

  4. Pour the juice over the layers.

  5. Top with whipped cream or boiled custard.

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. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  2. Pineapple + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,841 recipes

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

  3. Pineapple + creamtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,574 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

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 flavor and juice that soaks into the cake layers.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps form a syrup with the pineapple juice.
Stale plain cake
Soaks up the fruit juice, giving the trifle a soft, moist texture.

The step that matters

Simmer the mixture gently until the pineapple is tender. Gentle heat softens the fruit and draws out juice to form a syrup without breaking the pieces apart. Vigorous boiling can toughen or mash the fruit and make the syrup cloudy or overly reduced.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Strawberryfits better
  3. Raspberryfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, cream. 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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