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Puddings and Sauces
sugar, then more pine-apple, and so on until all is used, pour over a small tea-cup water, and cover with slices of cake which have been dipped in cold water; cover the whole with a buttered plate, and bake slowly for two hours. - Mrs. Wm. Smith, Jacksonville, Fla.
The text as printed begins mid-sentence — the head of the recipe, with its quantities of pineapple and sugar, is lost. What survives is the assembly and baking method for a layered pineapple and cake pudding, and that much is workable if you supply the proportions yourself.
- What is missingYou are given no weights and no dish size. Assume a deep baking dish holding roughly 2 quarts, a large pineapple peeled, cored and sliced thin, and about 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar total, sprinkled between layers rather than stirred in.
- A small tea-cupA nineteenth-century tea-cup is smaller than a modern mug; it is usually reckoned at around 4 fl oz, half a cup, though the term was never standardised. That is all the added liquid the surviving text calls for, the rest of the moisture coming out of the fruit.
- Bake slowlyThe book gives no temperatures; "slowly" indicates a slow oven, for which something in the region of 300F is the usual modern equivalent. Two hours at that heat lets the pineapple soften and its juice reduce into syrup without the sugar catching at the edges.
- Slices of cakeThis wants a dry, close-grained cake — day-old pound cake or plain sponge, cut about half an inch thick. Fresh, tender cake dipped in water collapses into paste. The dip is quick, in and out, not a soak.
- The buttered plateAn inverted plate laid directly on the surface is the hinge of the method: it traps steam so the cake steams rather than toasts, and it keeps the top layer submerged in juice. A plate that fits inside the rim still works; foil pressed over the dish is the modern equivalent, but the weight of a plate is doing part of the job.
- Fresh versus canned pineappleEither works. Canned fruit is already sweet, so cut the sugar by about a third, and drain it before layering or the pudding will be soupy.
- Yield and servingA 2-quart dish serves six to eight. Let it stand 20 minutes before serving so the syrup thickens; a plain pouring custard or unsweetened cream suits it better than any of the richer sauces in this chapter.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) was assembled from contributions mailed in by housewives across the country, each signed with a name and town, and this one carries a Jacksonville, Florida address — worth noticing, because Florida was in those years the principal site of commercial pineapple growing in the United States, chiefly on the Keys. Northern cooks of the period met pineapple as an expensive centerpiece fruit, so a recipe that layers it freely with cake and sugar reads as a local luxury shared with readers who could not easily copy it. The construction itself is old and thrifty: layers of stale cake soaked in fruit juice and baked or steamed under a weight is the same principle behind the English cabinet and summer puddings, a way of making yesterday's baking into today's dessert.