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Sugar
1 large pineapple. Twice as much rhubarb as pineapple. Remove the skin and eyes from the pineapple; discard these, then pick the flesh from the hard center. Measure the pineapple, cover with cold water, and set to cook. When tender, add a layer of rhubarb cut in small pieces and then a layer of sugar, until twice the measure of pineapple and about two and a half cups of sugar for each quart of material has been used.
Let simmer until boiling throughout, then store in cans in the usual manner.
A spring conserve of pineapple and rhubarb, written for a reader who already knew what "the usual manner" of canning meant. The cooking is straightforward; the sealing instruction is the problem.
- Why the cautionThe recipe ends with "store in cans in the usual manner" and leaves the whole sealing procedure to the reader: no jar temperature, no boiling-water-bath time, no headspace. In books of this period that phrase often meant open-kettle sealing, in which hot preserve is ladled into jars and sealed with no further processing — a method modern canning authorities abandoned because seals fail and surface mold and yeast survive. Use a current tested recipe from a reliable canning authority instead.
- Rhubarb leavesOnly the stalks are food. Rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid and anthraquinone glycosides at levels that make them genuinely poisonous, and they must be trimmed off and discarded before the stalks are cut.
- "Twice the measure" is ambiguousThe line can be read as twice the pineapple's volume in rhubarb, or as building layers until the total material is twice the pineapple. The original does not settle it.
- Measuring by volumeEverything here is measured by the quart after preparation, not weighed. Pick the flesh from the core, chop it, and measure it in a dry quart measure before adding water — the water is a cooking medium, not part of the count.
- Sugar ratioTwo and a half cups per quart of prepared fruit is about 1 lb 2 oz of sugar to somewhere between 1 and 1½ lb of fruit — less sugar than a traditional equal-weights jam, which is one reason it should not be relied on to keep on a shelf without processing.
- "Eyes"The hard dark spots left in the flesh after the rind is pared. They are commonly cut out in diagonal furrows following the spiral rows in which they sit.
- Rhubarb goes last for a reasonPineapple flesh is tough and needs a long simmer in water to soften. Rhubarb collapses in a few minutes, which is why it is layered in only once the pineapple is already tender.
Rhubarb was the household's first fresh "fruit" of the year — the old name pieplant says exactly what it was for — and it arrived in the kitchen months before local berries or orchard fruit. Pineapple, by contrast, was an import made newly ordinary by commercial canning. Pairing them is a very period move, matching a cheap acid garden crop against an expensive sweet tropical one so the pineapple stretches further, and it fits the logic of a preserving chapter organised around sugar, which was treated as the preservative agent in its own right rather than as a flavouring. The rest — "can in the usual manner" — assumed a reader who had watched her mother do it, an assumption these books make constantly and one that makes them unreliable as canning instruction today.