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PINEAPPLE CARDINAL (a cooling drink)
Peel a pineapple, and cut it into thin slices. Put these into a deep dish, cover them with powdered sugar, and let them stand four or five hours. Put the rind into a small stewpan, with as much water as will cover it, bring it to a boil, skim it, and pour it over the fruit. Add six ounces of refined sugar and a bottle of light wine. Cover the vessel which contains the fruit, etc., and leave it in a cool place for two hours. When it is wanted for use, stir it well, and mix with it a bottle of seltzer. If a larger quantity of the beverage is required, another bottle or more of wine may be added, but it must be remembered that six ounces of sugar must be put in with every additional bottle. If preferred, champagne may be used instead of seltzer. Time, seven or eight hours. Probable cost, pineapples, when cheap, 1s. to 2s. each.
A late-Victorian wine cup, closer to a German Bowle than to a cocktail. Almost all the work is waiting, and the only real decisions are the wine and how sweet you want it.
- The hinge: don't skip the macerationThe four or five hours under powdered sugar is what draws the juice out of the slices by osmosis and gives the drink its body. Cut the slices thin, no more than 5 mm, and turn them once or twice so the sugar reaches everything.
- Bottles and weightsA bottle of wine is 750 ml; use a similar volume of soda water. Six ounces of refined sugar is about 170 g, on top of whatever powdered sugar went over the fruit — start with half if you want it drier.
- "Light wine"The recipe means an unfortified table wine rather than a heavy or fortified one; it does not specify colour. A light white — hock, Moselle, a dry Riesling or Muscadet — suits the drink.
- Scrub the rind before boiling itThe rind decoction is there for perfume and to rinse the last sugar off the peel, but pineapple skin carries field soil and mould. Wash it hard under running water first, boil it properly, skim, and strain the liquid before it goes over the fruit.
- Powdered sugarNineteenth-century powdered sugar was simply sugar crushed fine, not the cornflour-cut icing sugar sold today. Caster sugar is the closer match and dissolves just as readily.
- Keep it cold, add the fizz lastTwo hours in a cool place means the refrigerator now. The seltzer or champagne goes in at the moment of serving; add it earlier and the drink is flat by the time it reaches the glass.
- Straining and servingLadle it from a bowl with the slices left in, or strain into a jug if you want a clear drink — the sugared pineapple is worth eating either way. As written, the quantity fills eight to ten glasses; ice the bowl rather than the glasses, since ice cubes dilute a drink already thinned with soda.
- Fresh pineapple onlyTinned pineapple is cooked and already in syrup; it will not give up juice to the sugar and the result is cloying. A ripe fruit that smells sweet at the base is what the recipe assumes.
"Cardinal" appears to be a borrowing from the German Kardinal, apparently one of the family of chilled wine bowls — Maibowle, Erdbeerbowle, Ananasbowle — that were fashionable across nineteenth-century northern Europe, in which fruit is steeped in sugar and light white wine and lengthened with something sparkling at the last minute. The name is often said to derive from the colour of a cardinal's robes, though pineapple versions like this one come out pale. The pricing note is the most revealing line on the page: pineapples "when cheap" at one or two shillings, the fruit having only recently moved from the hothouses of great estates into wider circulation. Serving one sliced up in a punch bowl was a quiet piece of display.