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Pineapple Cream in a Mould
Take a moderate-sized pineapple, fully ripe, pare it carefully, pick out the specks or eyes, strip all the pulp from the core, and cut it into dice with a silver knife. Strew over the fruit nine ounces of pounded and sifted loaf sugar, add two table-spoonfuls of brandy, and let it soak for two hours. Put the peel into a sauce-pan with half a pint of water, and let it simmer gently for an hour; strain it, and let it cool. Return the liquid into the saucepan, with the fruit, sugar, and juice, and boil all gently together for a quarter of an hour. Skim the mixture, and add to it three-quarters of an ounce of best isinglass. Boil it ten minutes longer, pour it out, and mix with it a pint and quarter of thick cream. Whisk the whole briskly until it begins to thicken, then pour it into a mould, and set it on ice. The cream should be stirred for a few minutes after it is put upon the ice, or the fruit will sink to the bottom. Probable cost, 4s. 6d., with pineapples at 1s. 6d. each, and cream at 1s. 6d. per pint. Sufficient for a quart mould.
A Victorian moulded cream that depends on two things going right: killing the enzyme in the pineapple, and catching the setting point before the fruit sinks.
- Boil the fruit — this is the hingeFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that breaks down gelatin and will leave you with a soupy mould. The recipe's quarter-hour boil, plus ten minutes more with the isinglass, denatures it. Do not shorten the cooking or slip in any raw pineapple at the end.
- IsinglassIsinglass is a collagen setting agent made from fish swim bladders, chiefly sturgeon; it has largely vanished from domestic kitchens, though it is still sold as a fining agent for beer and wine. Powdered leaf or granulated gelatin replaces it, but the strengths are not equivalent and three-quarters of an ounce of isinglass does not convert cleanly; for a quart mould holding this much cream you are in the region of 15–20 g of modern powdered gelatin. Test a spoonful on a cold saucer before committing the batch.
- Imperial measuresThe pint here is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of water is 10 fl oz (about 300 ml) and a pint and a quarter of cream is 25 fl oz (about 700 ml). "Thick cream" means double or heavy cream, not clotted.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined sugar sold in a solid cone and broken off, then pounded and sifted — granulated or caster sugar does the same job with no pounding. Nine ounces (255 g) with a fully ripe pineapple is very sweet by current taste; two-thirds of that is defensible.
- The silver knifeSilver was specified because the carbon steel blades of the period reacted with fruit acid and left a metallic taste and grey stains. Stainless steel is fine.
- Setting on ice"Set it on ice" means an ice bath or ice chest; the refrigerator does the same work. Whisk over ice only until the mixture thickens to the consistency of pouring custard, then mould and chill 4–6 hours. Keep stirring during the first few minutes on ice, as the recipe says, or the diced fruit settles into a solid layer at the base — which becomes the top when you turn it out.
- UnmouldingDip the mould to its rim in hot water for a few seconds, loosen the edge, and invert onto a chilled plate. A metal mould releases far more reliably than glass or ceramic.
- YieldA quart mould serves eight to ten as a dessert course.
Cassell's costing tells the story: pineapples at one shilling and sixpence each, the same price as a pint of cream. A century earlier a pineapple in Britain was a status object grown at enormous expense in heated "pineries" and, if a much-repeated tradition is to be believed, often rented out for the evening as a table ornament rather than eaten. Steamship traffic from the West Indies and the Azores, and later canning, dragged the price down through the second half of the nineteenth century, and by the time this dictionary appeared the fruit had crossed from a display piece into something a middle-class household could reasonably turn into a moulded cream. The isinglass points the other way, to an older kitchen — a costly import bought for its clarity and clean flavour, and steadily displaced over the course of the century by cheap commercial gelatin in sheets and packets. The brandy, the two-hour maceration and the long simmer of the peel to extract every last bit of flavour are all habits of a cook treating expensive fruit as something not to waste.