Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pineapple Chips
Pineapple Chips
Pare some pineapples, and carefully remove the specks or eyes with the point of a knife. Cut them into slices, and place these on a large dish in a single layer with as much powdered and sifted sugar sprinkled over as will cover them. Keep the fruit in a hot closet until it is dry, turning it regularly each day. When the dry point is reached, put the slices on a tin, and place them in a quick oven for ten minutes. When quite cool, store them in single layers in a tin box with writing-paper between each layer. Time, nine or ten days to dry the slices.
This is candied dried pineapple by the slow osmotic method: sugar draws the juice out, the warm air takes the moisture away, and the fruit finishes as a translucent chip. Nothing here is difficult, but almost everything about the equipment has changed.
- The hinge: sugar first, heat secondThe sugar is not merely a coating; it draws juice to the surface of the cut slices. The recipe applies sugar and the gentle warmth of the closet together, and reserves any fierce heat for the final ten minutes in the oven.
- "Hot closet"A warming cupboard beside the range, holding roughly 110-140F with air moving through it. A food dehydrator at 135F is the direct equivalent; failing that, an oven at its lowest setting with the door propped open a crack.
- Nine or ten daysThat is the timescale for a Victorian airing cupboard. In a dehydrator the same slices, cut about a quarter-inch thick, will be at the dry point in 10 to 18 hours depending on ripeness and thickness.
- "A quick oven for ten minutes"Quick is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-425F. At that heat the final crisping is a matter of watching, not timing: the sugar on the surface will colour and then burn quickly.
- Removing the eyesTrim the eyes out in diagonal channels following the spiral they grow in, rather than gouging each one. It costs far less flesh and leaves slices that hold together as they shrink.
- Powdered and sifted sugarThis means ordinary granulated sugar ground fine and passed through a sieve, not modern icing sugar with its added starch. Caster sugar is the closest match; icing sugar will cake on the surface.
- Writing-paperA smooth sheet used simply as a liner between the layers. Use parchment or waxed paper instead, and store in a genuinely airtight tin — residual moisture in the chips will make them tacky in a loose box.
Drying with sugar was understood as a technique, applicable to apricots, greengages or angelica as readily as to pineapple. Pineapples had been grown in heated British pineries since the eighteenth century as a conspicuous luxury, but by the time this dictionary appeared steamships had brought West Indian and Azorean fruit into ordinary greengrocers, and a household could contemplate turning a whole one into chips for the store cupboard. The nine-or-ten-day timescale is a reminder that the hot closet — the airing cupboard, the plate warmer, the space above the range — was a working piece of kitchen equipment, heated by the range fire, and that recipes were written to exploit it.