Home › The Principles of Cookery › PINEAPPLES, PRESERVED (for a short time only)
PINEAPPLES, PRESERVED (for a short time only)
Pare the fruit, cut it into slices, and remove the specks and the hard part from the centre. Tear the rind into small pieces; put these and the waste portions into a stewpan with as much water as will cover them, and let them simmer gently for a quarter of an hour, or until the liquid is pleasantly flavoured. Strain it, and put it back into the saucepan with the slices of fruit, and let them simmer a quarter of an hour: then add sugar to taste, and simmer another quarter of an hour. Turn it out, and it is ready for serving. Probable cost of pineapples, when cheap, 1s. 6d. to 2s. each.
This is a stewed pineapple compote rather than a true preserve — the title's "for a short time only" is the book warning you it has no keeping quality. The whole trick is the first step: the peel and core are simmered to make a flavoured liquid, so nothing of the fruit is wasted.
- QuantitiesOne medium pineapple (about 3 lb untrimmed) yields roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb of usable slices and serves four. Sugar "to taste" works out at about 1/2 to 3/4 cup for that amount, depending on ripeness; add it in stages and taste, since a ripe fruit needs far less than an underripe one.
- VesselA stewpan here is any wide, heavy saucepan. Use non-reactive — stainless or enamelled — as pineapple is acidic enough to pick up a metallic taste from bare aluminium or unlined copper.
- Sugar goes in last for a reasonAdding sugar only after the fruit has softened is deliberate. Sugar draws water out of the slices and firms them, so early sugar leaves the pineapple tough at the same total cooking time.
- TimingsFifteen minutes for the rind infusion is right. The slices, though, get thirty minutes in all — fifteen before the sugar and fifteen after — which is generous by modern taste; thin slices will collapse. Check at eight to ten minutes and stop when a knife tip meets slight resistance.
- TrimmingThe "specks" are probably the fibrous eyes left after paring, though they may simply mean blemishes; the hard part from the centre is the core. Remove both, but keep them for the infusion — much of the aromatic flavour sits in the peel and just under it.
- KeepingThis is not sealed, sterilised or sugar-saturated, so it is not shelf stable. Cool, refrigerate in a covered jar and use within three or four days. Do not treat it as a canning recipe.
- An incidental benefitRaw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests protein and is why fresh pineapple stops gelatine setting and stings the mouth. Cooking destroys it, so this compote can be set in a jelly or served with cream or fresh cheese without trouble.
- ServingWarm with sponge cake or rice pudding, or chilled with the syrup spooned over. The syrup thickens noticeably as it cools.
Cassell's price note — 1s. 6d. to 2s. each "when cheap" — is the most revealing line on the page. Pineapples reached British tables first as spectacular objects rather than food: grown in heated "pineries" from the eighteenth century at enormous expense, and said to have been hired out by the day as centrepieces before being eaten, though the story is thinly documented. By the time this dictionary appeared, steamships carrying fruit from the West Indies and the Azores had brought the price down to something a middle-class household could contemplate, though a shilling and sixpence was still a real sum against a servant's weekly wage. Hence the frugality of the method: the rind and core, thrown away today, are simmered to extract every bit of flavour from an expensive fruit. The heading's careful qualification also reflects a period distinction between a proper preserve — boiled hard with its full weight of sugar and sealed — and a lightly sugared stewed fruit meant for the week's table.