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Pineapple to Cut for Serving
Pare a pineapple so that the fruit shall be wasted as little as possible, and in order to do this notch it in and out, and carefully remove all the specks or eyes with a silver fork, pick the fruit from the core in pieces as large as a bean, and place the dish which contains it on ice until it is wanted. Sugar may be strewed over the fruit or not. It draws out the juice, which is not always desired.
A preparation method rather than a cooked dish, and it turns on two things: the spiral notching that saves the flesh around the eyes, and the decision about sugar.
- The notchingCut off the crown and base, pare away the rind in strips, then cut shallow grooves that follow the lines of the eyes around the fruit. The point of 'notch it in and out' appears to be to lift the fibrous eyes out in narrow V-shaped channels rather than paring a thick layer of good flesh off the whole surface.
- Why a silver forkCarbon-steel knives and forks of the period reacted with fruit acids, blackening the blade and leaving a metallic taste. Stainless steel does neither, so any modern fork or the tip of a paring knife will do for flicking out stray eyes.
- "Pieces as large as a bean"Roughly half-inch chunks. The instruction to pick the fruit from the core rather than slice it gives irregular pieces along the natural grain, which look less mechanical in a glass dish.
- The corePerfectly edible, just tougher and less sweet. It can be sliced thin for the fruit bowl or kept back for a syrup or a drink rather than discarded.
- The sugar questionSugar draws juice out by osmosis, and fairly quickly. Good for a compote or a trifle where syrup is wanted; bad if the pineapple is going out as dressed fruit, where it will sit in a puddle and go slack. Sugar at the last moment or not at all.
- BromelainFresh pineapple contains an enzyme that breaks down protein, which is why it stings the mouth in quantity and why it will not set in gelatine. Only cooked or canned pineapple works in a jelly.
- ChillingThe recipe simply says to keep the dish on ice until wanted; half an hour to an hour covered in the refrigerator is enough. Cut fruit held much longer tends to soften.
- YieldA ripe pineapple of about 3 to 4 lb should give something in the region of 4 cups of prepared fruit, serving four to six.
Cassell's is writing at a moment when pineapple was ceasing to be purely a symbol of extravagance, though it was still far from commonplace. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries British pineapples came from heated "pineries" on great estates, at a cost that made a single fruit a centrepiece to be displayed; the fruit is often said to have been rented for the evening and returned, though this is a much-repeated anecdote rather than documented practice. Regular steamship traffic from the Azores and the West Indies brought the price down through the second half of the nineteenth century, with Hawaiian supply arriving only later, after the book's own moment, which is why a general household dictionary can afford to treat the fruit as something to be cut up and eaten rather than admired. The instruction to waste as little as possible still carries the older attitude, and the fussiness about a silver fork and a bed of ice belongs to a service tradition in which fresh fruit closed the meal at the dessert course, dressed and cold, with the sugar left to the diner's discretion.