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Pineapple Preserve
Six pineapples, six oranges, one pound of sugar to one pound of fruit, juice of two lemons; boil until thick, and put away in tumblers. Very nice.
— Mrs. Herbert Dederick
A Victorian open-kettle preserve of the simplest type: fruit, an equal weight of sugar, citrus juice, and a long boil. The recipe assumes you already know how to judge a set and how to close a jelly tumbler, so those are the gaps worth filling.
- Weigh after peeling, not before"One pound of sugar to one pound of fruit" most likely means prepared fruit — pineapple peeled, cored and chopped, oranges peeled and sectioned or sliced. Six pineapples would yield somewhere in the region of 9-12 lb of trimmed flesh depending on their size, so this is a large batch; a quarter of it is more manageable on a domestic stove.
- What to do with the orangesThe receipt is silent. Other fruit preserves of the period sometimes use the pulp and juice with a little of the peel sliced thin, discarding the bitter white pith. If you want a perfumed, marmalade-like edge, include a little zest.
- TumblersThese are straight-sided drinking glasses used as jelly glasses, sealed on top with melted paraffin. The wax seal is no longer considered reliable; use standard canning jars.
- Boil until thickPineapple has little pectin, so the set here comes from sugar concentration and evaporation, not gelling. Cook to about 220F at sea level, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold plate wrinkles when pushed. Stir often near the end — a 1:1 sugar syrup scorches quickly.
- Fresh pineapple and enzymesRaw pineapple contains bromelain, a protease, which is why it is generally avoided raw in gelatine desserts. Cooking deactivates it, so it is no obstacle here. Expect the fruit to break down into a soft, jammy mass under the long boil rather than staying in neat cubes.
- StorageFill clean hot half-pint jars, leaving a quarter inch of headspace, and process in a boiling-water bath for the time your current canning guide specifies for a high-acid fruit preserve. Otherwise treat it as a refrigerator preserve and use within a month.
- YieldMade in full, this probably fills something on the order of fifteen to twenty half-pints, though the exact figure depends on the size of the fruit. Scaled to one pineapple and one orange, perhaps three.
Preserves like this belong to the period when pineapple was becoming an ordinary American ingredient rather than a symbol of wealth. Through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a pineapple in the northern states was an expensive rarity, hothouse-grown or shipped from the Caribbean at high cost; the often-repeated story that whole fruit was rented out as a table centrepiece is traditional and not well documented. Steamships and later refrigerated rail transport changed that, and by the closing decades of the nineteenth century Florida and Caribbean fruit reached northern markets cheaply enough that a household could buy six at once and put them up. The pound-for-pound sugar ratio is the old preserving standard, high enough that the sugar itself does much of the preserving work, and the community-cookbook form — a neighbour's name attached, the endorsement "very nice" standing in for any further instruction — assumes a reader who has made preserves before and needs only the proportions.