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Dessert

Plain Pineapple Pie

A simple pie made with canned pineapple, sugar, flour, salt, and butter, baked in a flaky pastry crust.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Plain Pineapple Pie

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Preheat the oven to 400°F (200°C).

  2. Line a shallow 9 or 10 inch pie pan with flake pastry.

  3. In a bowl, mix the pineapple with sugar, flour, and salt.

  4. Place 1 tablespoon of flour in the bottom of the lined pie pan and rub it into the pastry to close the pores.

Assemble and bake

  1. Pour the pineapple mixture into the pan and dot with butter at regular intervals.

  2. Make an upper crust using your preferred method.

  3. Bake for about 25 minutes or until well browned.

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. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Sugar + flourtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together92,116 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

  3. Pineapple + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,134 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together98,233 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

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

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Diced canned pineapple
Provides the fruit filling and most of the moisture that the pastry must contain.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps thicken the juices as the filling cooks.
Flour
Thickens the pineapple juices so the filling sets rather than running out of the crust.
Butter
Adds richness and flavor to the filling as it melts into the fruit.

The step that matters

Rubbing flour into the bottom crust. A thin layer of flour on the pastry absorbs juice from the fruit, helping keep the bottom crust from becoming soggy during baking.

Swap the pineapple

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

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Figfits better
  4. Pineapplethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, flour, butter. 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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