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Pine-Apple Pudding
Butter a pudding-dish, and line the bottom and sides with slices of stale cake (sponge-cake is best), pare and slice thin a large pineapple, place in the dish first a layer of pine-apple, then strew with .
The text breaks off mid-instruction — the original page ends at "then strew with" — so what follows is guidance on the parts that survive, not a reconstruction of the missing half.
- The recipe is incompleteThe line ends before the sweetening, the custard or liquid, and the baking are given. Comparable puddings of the period alternate cake, fruit and sugar and are moistened with a thin custard or the fruit's own juice before baking. Treat this page as a fragment and work from a full charlotte or cabinet-pudding recipe if you want a reliable result.
- Stale cake is the pointFresh sponge softens quickly and can go pasty. Day-old or two-day-old cake, sliced, absorbs juice and custard while keeping its structure — the same logic as stale bread in a bread pudding.
- Pineapple in 1877Pineapple -- the recipe simply calls for 'a large pineapple,' pared and sliced thin. Cut out the fibrous core, which stays tough however long it bakes.
- Raw pineapple and gelatinBromelain in fresh pineapple digests gelatin and will keep any cold jellied version from setting, and it can also thin an egg custard. Baking destroys the enzyme, so a baked pudding is safe; a chilled one needs the fruit scalded or cooked first.
- OvenThe fragment gives no baking instruction. If you finish it as a baked pudding, use a water bath when custard is added and allow roughly 45 minutes to an hour, until the centre is just set and no longer liquid when the dish is tilted.
- SweeteningThe strewing was almost certainly sugar, perhaps with a little grated lemon rind. Canned pineapple is often packed in syrup rather than being fresh fruit, and will need less.
- YieldThe recipe gives no dish size or number of servings. It is better warm than hot, and better still at room temperature, when the cake has finished drinking the juice.
Pineapple was a luxury in the American Midwest of the 1870s — shipped from the Caribbean and Florida, expensive, and a mark of hospitality long before it was an everyday fruit — which is why a recipe using a whole one sits in a book otherwise thrifty enough to build its puddings out of yesterday's cake. The method here is the standard nineteenth-century way of using up stale sponge: line a dish, layer in fruit and sugar, bind with custard, bake. English cooks called the results charlottes or cabinet puddings; the Marysville, Ohio, ladies behind Buckeye Cookery listed this one simply by its fruit. The entry survives truncated, though whether that break originated in the printing or in later transcription is not clear.