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Pineapple Ice Cream
Whisk the yolks of six eggs thoroughly. Mix with them half a pint of lukewarm milk, and add two ounces of loaf sugar. Stir this custard over a gentle fire until it begins to thicken, then pour it out, and stir it again. Pare a pineapple with as little waste as possible. Cut it into slices, and boil them for five minutes in a syrup made of half a pound of loaf sugar and a quarter of a pint of water. Press the fruit through a coarse sieve, and stir the pulp and the syrup into the custard. Put the cream into a mould, and freeze in the usual way. This cream may be made with half a pound of preserved pineapple. Probable cost, pineapples, 1s. to 2s. each. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A custard-based ice with no cream in it at all — the word "cream" here means the frozen dessert, not the dairy. Two things decide whether it works: the custard must not curdle, and the pineapple must be cooked.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of milk is 1¼ cups and a quarter pint of water is 5 fl oz (generous ½ cup). Two ounces of sugar for the custard is about ¼ cup; the half pound for the syrup is about 1 cup.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in cones, chipped or crushed before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute, measure for measure.
- Boil the pineapple — this is the hingeFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests protein and will thin a custard and give it a bitter edge. The five minutes in syrup denatures the enzyme. Do not shortcut it by stirring raw purée into the custard.
- Custard temperature"Until it begins to thicken" over a gentle fire corresponds to roughly 170–175F on a thermometer if you want a figure, stirring constantly; six yolks in 1¼ cups of milk sets fast. Pull it off when it coats the spoon. The recipe pours the custard out and stirs it again, which would let the heat off and keep residual warmth from setting the eggs further, though it does not say so; straining is a modern addition.
- "Freeze in the usual way"In the 1870s this meant a pewter mould or a pail packed in cracked ice and coarse salt, turned and scraped by hand. Chill the mixture thoroughly first, then churn in an ice cream maker; the texture will be icier than a modern cream-based ice because there is no butterfat beyond the yolks.
- Preserved pineapple optionHalf a pound of pineapple candied or in heavy syrup, as the recipe allows. It is already cooked, so no enzyme problem, but it carries a great deal of sugar — cut the syrup sugar back accordingly or the ice will refuse to freeze hard.
- YieldFive or six small servings, as stated — roughly a quart. Modern portions being what they are, treat it as four.
Cassell's quotes pineapples at one to two shillings each, which is the sound of a luxury on its way down in price. British pineapples had been grown since the early eighteenth century in heated "pineries" at enormous expense, an ornament for the tables of the very rich; by the second half of the nineteenth century steamships bringing fruit from the Azores and the West Indies were undercutting the hothouses badly, and a pineapple that was once said to have been rented out as a centrepiece — an often-repeated story, though the documentation is thin — could be bought, pared and boiled into an ice for a dinner of six. The recipe belongs to the older French tradition of the crème glacée, a boiled egg custard frozen in a mould packed with ice and salt — a technique that reached English kitchens through confectioners in the eighteenth century, though from the mid-nineteenth century hand-cranked churns had displaced much of it. The instruction to pare the fruit "with as little waste as possible" is the tell: the sugar was cheap by then, and the pineapple was not.