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Pineapple Jam
Weigh the pineapples, then skin and eye them, and cut them into thin slices. Boil these till cooked in as much water as will barely cover them, and add a little sugar. Rub them through a sieve. Take half a pound of sugar to one pound of fruit. Boil this with the pineapple water to a clear thick syrup, add the fruit pulp, and stir over the fire till done.
A plain fruit-butter style jam: the pineapple is cooked, sieved to a pulp, and folded into a syrup made from its own cooking liquid. Two things in the wording need translating before you start.
- Weigh first, then peelThe recipe has you weigh the pineapples before skinning, so its "pound of fruit" may well mean the whole-fruit weight; the text does not say. Note that the two readings pull in opposite directions: whole weight gives a higher proportion of sugar to finished pulp, prepared weight a lower one. Decide which you are working from before you start.
- "Eye them"Pineapple skin leaves rows of hard brown eyes behind after paring. Cut them out in diagonal grooves, the standard spiral trim; missing them puts fibrous specks through the pulp. Cut out the woody core as well, which this recipe assumes without saying.
- Rubbing through a sieveA drum sieve and wooden mushroom was the Victorian tool. A food mill on the medium plate does the same job in a minute; a blender will not, because it pulverises the fibre rather than holding it back, and the jam turns stringy.
- The sugar ratio is lowEight ounces of sugar to a pound of fruit is roughly half what a keeping jam normally carries. Combined with pineapple's high water content, this gives a soft, short-life preserve. Treat it as a refrigerator jam, used within two or three weeks, unless you are processing it properly in a water bath by a current tested method.
- Judging "till done"The recipe asks only for a "clear thick syrup" before the pulp goes in; then cook the combined mixture to 220F/105C, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold saucer wrinkles when pushed. Pineapple is low in pectin, so the set will be loose whatever you do — expect a thick spooning consistency rather than a firm jelly.
- Stir constantly at the endOnce the pulp is in, the mixture is thick enough to catch and scorch on the base of the pan. Use a wide heavy pan and a flat-ended wooden spatula that reaches the corners, and keep it moving.
- Fresh fruit onlyRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which is why it will not set gelatine — the boiling here destroys it, so that is no obstacle. But canned pineapple, already cooked and packed in syrup, gives a flat, flabby result; the recipe depends on fresh fruit and its own cooking water for flavour.
- YieldAround 3 lb of whole pineapple gives roughly 1 1/2 lb of prepared fruit and something like two to three half-pint jars, depending on how far you reduce it.
Pineapple reached British kitchens as an emblem of expense — grown in heated pineries on great estates through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, then, by the time Cassell's was compiled, arriving in quantity by steamship from the West Indies and later the Azores. That shift is why a jam recipe like this one can appear in a general household dictionary at all: the fruit had moved from the hothouse to the greengrocer within living memory. The method belongs to an older school of preserving in which fruit is cooked, sieved to a pulp and then married to a syrup boiled separately, rather than sugar and fruit being cooked together from the start — a technique that suits fibrous fruit and gives a smoother finished preserve. Its modest sugar proportion suggests a jam meant for fairly prompt eating in the house, not for the store cupboard.