Home › The Principles of Cookery › PILEORADE (a delicious summer drink)
PILEORADE (a delicious summer drink)
Put the thin rinds of three oranges and three lemons into a jug, with their juice, and a quarter of a pound of pineapple in thin shavings. Add two quarts of boiling water, cover at once, and set by to cool. When cold, sweeten with a quarter of a pound of loaf sugar, and add a little pounded ice. Probable cost, 1s. 3d.
A cold infusion rather than a mixed drink: the boiling water pulls the oils out of the citrus rind and the sweetness out of the pineapple, and everything else happens as it cools. Two things decide whether it is good — how you take the rind, and when you add the sugar.
- Thin rinds means zest onlyPare the oranges and lemons with a vegetable peeler or sharp knife, taking the coloured layer and as little white pith as possible. Pith left in the boiling water will make the jug bitter.
- Quantities in modern termsTwo imperial quarts is about 2.3 litres (roughly 9 to 10 US cups). A quarter pound of pineapple is 115 g, cut into shavings so the flesh gives up its juice. A quarter pound of loaf sugar is 115 g, or a generous half cup granulated.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold as a hard cone that was broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct equivalent; caster dissolves faster.
- Sweeten as syrup, not as grainsSugar dissolves slowly in a cold jug. Either dissolve it in a little of the hot liquid before the jug cools, or make a simple syrup separately and stir that in at the end, tasting as you go — the recipe as written sweetens when cold.
- Cover at once, and mean itThe instruction is not fussiness. Citrus oil is volatile and the aroma leaves with the steam; a covered jug traps it in the liquid. Leave it to cool at room temperature for an hour or two, then chill.
- Strain before servingThe original leaves the rind and fruit in, which keeps extracting. Strain out the solids once the drink is cold and to your taste, or it will drift bitter in the refrigerator overnight.
- Pounded iceCrushed ice, made by wrapping cubes in a cloth and hitting them. Add it at the table rather than in advance, since it dilutes a drink that is already fairly delicate.
- YieldTwo quarts plus ice serves eight to ten in tumblers.
- Fresh pineapple onlyCanned pineapple has been heat-treated and packed in syrup; it will sweeten the jug without contributing much aroma. The recipe depends on raw fruit giving up its perfume to hot water.
The name has often been read as a portmanteau of the kind Victorian drink books turned out freely — lemonade, orangeade, and here a pineapple version — though the recipe itself offers no etymology. What it does share with those drinks is the same principle of steeping fruit and rind in hot water and letting it cool. What makes this one a period marker is the pineapple itself: grown at ruinous expense in English hothouses through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it became merely expensive rather than legendary once imported West Indian and Azorean fruit began arriving in British ports in greater quantity from the 1860s and 1870s. Cassell's quotes the probable cost at one shilling and threepence, which for two quarts of a soft drink was not cheap but was within reach of the middle-class household the dictionary was written for.