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Pineapple Marmalade
Choose ripe sound pines, pare them, take out the eyes, weigh the fruit, and allow an equal quantity of pounded and dried sugar. Grate the flesh on a coarse grater, then put it over a moderate fire, and let it heat gently for ten minutes, or until it is quite tender. Add the sugar very gradually, and boil the mixture until it looks thick and clear. Turn it into jars, and cover in the usual way. If preferred, the fruit may be cut up and pounded instead of being grated; but though more troublesome it is best when grated. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. per pound.
A straightforward equal-weight fruit-and-sugar preserve, written when "pines" needed no explanation and jars were sealed with paper rather than lids. A few points bring it up to date.
- "Pines" and their eyesPines are pineapples. Paring and removing the eyes means cutting off the rind, then digging out the sunken brown eyelets with the tip of a knife or by cutting diagonal V-grooves. The recipe does not mention the woody core, though grating on a coarse grater leaves it behind in any case.
- Pounded and dried sugarThis is loaf sugar crushed and dried before use; drying kept it free of moisture and it dissolved readily. Ordinary granulated sugar does the same job with no preparation.
- Weigh after preparingThe instruction is equal weights of prepared flesh and sugar, so weigh the fruit once pared and cored. A 2 lb pineapple yields roughly half its weight in usable flesh.
- "A moderate fire"On a stovetop this is medium-low. The ten-minute pre-cook softens the fibre before the sugar goes in; adding sugar to raw pineapple firms the flesh and keeps it stringy.
- Add the sugar graduallyThe hinge of the recipe. Dumping it in at once drops the temperature and encourages crystals on the pan sides; stir it in a few handfuls at a time and let each dissolve fully before boiling hard.
- Judging "thick and clear"Pineapple is low in pectin and will never set like a firm jam; expect a thick, glossy, spoonable conserve. If you want a number, 220F on a sugar thermometer, though the visual cue here is reliable enough.
- Grated versus poundedThe book simply says grating is best without explaining why; the likely reason is that grating shreds the fibre across the grain. A food processor pulsed briefly gives a similar result; do not pur he texture collapses.
- "Cover in the usual way"At the time that meant a brandy-soaked paper disc and a tied cover of parchment or bladder. Today: hot sterilised jars with two-piece lids, either water-bath processed to a tested current method, or simply cooled and kept in the refrigerator for a few weeks.
- YieldTwo medium pineapples with their weight in sugar give roughly three to four half-pint jars.
Cassell's quotes pineapple at 1s. 6d. a pound of finished marmalade, which places it firmly among the luxuries: fresh pines reached British kitchens either from hothouses on large estates or, by the later nineteenth century, on steamers from the Azores and the West Indies. "Marmalade" here carries its older, broader sense of any fruit boiled to a thick mass with sugar, from the Portuguese marmelada, a quince paste; the narrowing of the word to mean citrus preserve is a later English habit and was far from settled when this book was compiled. The insistence on grating rather than pounding is practical rather than fussy: pineapple is unusually fibrous, and shredding it against a coarse grater cuts those fibres short in a way that mashing does not. That fresh pineapple misbehaves with milk, cream and gelatine has a chemical explanation that was unavailable at the time: the enzyme bromelain, which digests protein, was not identified until the closing years of the century.