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Pine Apple Pudding
Chop a pine apple fine; take some cake which is a little dry, rub it fine in your hands or crush it on a kneading board; put it into a pudding dish in alternate layers with the pine apple, sweeten abundantly, moisten with cold water, put it in a pan with a tube in it, steam an hour, bake half an hour. Eat cold or hot with a rich foaming sauce.
A thrift pudding built from stale cake and fresh pineapple, steamed then briefly baked. The original assumes you know what a steaming mold is and how sweet your fruit is; both need saying.
- "A pan with a tube in it"This is a tube mold or pudding mold with a central funnel, which conducts heat to the middle of a dense mixture. A modern tube pan or Bundt pan works; cover it tightly with foil for the steaming stage so condensation does not drip in.
- How to steam itSet the covered mold on a rack in a large pot, add boiling water to come a third of the way up, cover the pot and keep the water at a bare simmer for an hour, topping up as needed. Then uncover and bake at 350F for the final half hour to dry and lightly brown the top.
- Sweeten abundantly, but less than they didPineapple of the period often arrived underripe and sharply acid, and period cookbooks assume a tarter fruit than we buy. A ripe modern pineapple is far sweeter; start with about 1/2 cup sugar for one fruit and taste the mixture before it goes in the mold.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives none. As a starting point, one medium pineapple, finely chopped, against roughly 4 to 5 cups of dry cake crumbs will fill a mold of 2 1/2 to 3 quarts and serve six to eight.
- The cakeStale pound cake, sponge or plain butter cake all suit. Anything heavily iced or chocolate will muddy it, and very soft fresh cake collapses to paste rather than holding layers.
- "Moisten with cold water"Water is the plain version; the reserved pineapple juice, or juice topped up with milk, gives a much better result. Add it a few tablespoons at a time until the crumbs are damp throughout but not swimming, since excess liquid will pool in the bottom of the mold.
- BromelainRaw pineapple contains an enzyme that breaks down protein and will keep gelatin from setting; it can also give milk or cream mixtures an off, sometimes bitter taste. The hour of steaming destroys it, so make the pudding first and pair it with sauce afterward rather than combining raw fruit with anything gelatin-based.
- "A rich foaming sauce"Period usage means a sweet sauce of butter, sugar and egg beaten over hot water until frothy, often with wine or sherry. A sabayon or a foamy custard sauce is the direct modern equivalent.
Cake-crumb puddings like this one belong to the large nineteenth-century family of dishes designed to use up stale baking, alongside bread puddings, charlottes and brown Betties. The pineapple is the luxury note. Fresh pineapple reached American cities in growing quantity over the second half of the century as shipping from the West Indies improved, and it remained expensive and uneven enough that cookbooks went on cautioning against tough or acid fruit; the canning trade, and later Hawaiian production, would eventually make it an everyday sweet. The pairing is characteristic of the period's dessert chapters: an imported delicacy stretched across a base of yesterday's cake, steamed in a mold and finished in the oven, and served with a frothy sweet sauce that did most of the work of making it feel like a company dish.