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Pine-Apple Sauce
Mix two table-spoons butter and four heaping table-spoons sugar (some add white of an egg), flavor with pine-apple (or any other flavoring), form a pyramid, and with a tea-spoon shape it like a pine-apple. Or, to a grated pine-apple add a very little water, simmer until quite tender, mix with it, by degrees, half its weight in sugar, boil gently for five minutes, and serve.
Two different sauces sit in one paragraph: a flavored hard sauce moulded to look like a pineapple, and a genuine cooked pineapple sauce. Decide which you are making before you start.
- The two recipesThe first is butter and sugar creamed together and served cold, in the manner of hard sauce for puddings. The second is a stovetop fruit sauce and contains no butter at all. They are not variations on one another.
- Proportions for the hard sauceTwo tablespoons butter to four heaping tablespoons sugar is roughly 1 oz butter to 2 oz sugar, a stiff 1:2 ratio that holds a moulded shape. Use softened unsalted butter and superfine or confectioners' sugar; granulated will stay gritty in an uncooked sauce. This quantity serves two or three.
- ShapingChill the creamed mixture until firm, mound it into a cone, then press the bowl of a teaspoon over the surface in overlapping rows to suggest the scales. It softens fast in a warm room, so mould it and return it to the refrigerator until the pudding goes to the table.
- The optional raw egg whiteThe white lightens the sauce but is never cooked. If you want it, use pasteurized egg white; otherwise leave it out, which the recipe plainly allows.
- "Flavor with pine-apple"This means pineapple extract or essence, sold in the period alongside lemon and vanilla. Modern pineapple extract is potent and mostly synthetic; start with a quarter teaspoon. Juice is a poor substitute here, since more than a few drops of liquid will loosen the creamed butter and sugar.
- The cooked versionOne medium pineapple yields roughly 3 cups grated flesh; "half its weight in sugar" then works out to something like 1 1/2 cups, but the recipe fixes the proportion by weight rather than volume, so weigh the fruit if you can. Add the sugar in stages only after the fruit is tender, as sugar added early keeps the flesh firm. Five minutes at a gentle boil is enough to thicken it slightly; longer and it turns to jam.
- Fresh versus cannedCrushed canned pineapple works, but it is already packed in syrup, so cut the sugar by about half and taste as you go. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which cooking destroys — relevant only if you intend to fold the sauce into anything gelatin-set.
- ServingEither sauce belongs with a steamed or boiled pudding, plain cake, or cottage pudding. The cooked one is good warm; the moulded one must be cold.
Buckeye Cookery (Minneapolis, 1877, out of an Ohio compilation) came out just as pineapple was shifting from a luxury to something an inland household might reasonably see. Before rail refrigeration, fresh pineapple in Ohio meant a fruit shipped up from the Caribbean at real expense; the first half of this entry uses flavoring extract — the recipe allows "any other flavoring" — and a decorative moulded shape to suggest the fruit rather than use it, and the pyramid shaped with a teaspoon is a small piece of table theater. Hard sauce of this kind, creamed butter and sugar served cold against a hot pudding, is generally traced to English pudding cookery and appears in American books throughout the century under names including hard sauce and cold sauce.