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Frozen Pineapple Custard
Add to a quart of milk a tea-cup of sugar and bring to a boil. Add four well-beaten eggs and let the mixture thicken, watching carefully, however, that the mixture does not again boil. Let this cool, then add one pint of pineapple juice or one pint of grated pineapple and freeze. A little lemon juice added will bring out the fruit flavour.
A stirred custard base with fruit folded in and churned — the method is sound, but pineapple is a difficult fruit to put into dairy and the original says nothing about it.
- The hinge: fresh pineapple and milkRaw pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that attacks egg and milk proteins and can leave the custard thin and off-tasting. Heat the juice or grated fruit to a simmer for a couple of minutes and cool it before combining, or use canned pineapple, which has already been heat-treated.
- A tea-cup of sugarPeriod teacups run about 6 fluid ounces, so read this as roughly 3/4 cup, not a full measuring cup. With a pint of sweet pineapple going in, that is about right; taste the cooled base before freezing, since freezing mutes sweetness.
- "Let the mixture thicken"This is a stirred custard: cook over low or medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until it coats a spoon at 175-180F. Above about 185F the eggs scramble, which is what the warning against a second boil is guarding against.
- Temper the eggsThe instruction to add beaten eggs to boiled milk works only if you pour a ladle of the hot milk into the eggs first, whisking, then return the mixture to the pan. Adding cold eggs straight to boiling milk gives you sweet egg curds.
- Strain and chillPass the cooked custard through a fine sieve, then refrigerate until thoroughly cold — several hours, or overnight. Churning a lukewarm base produces coarse ice crystals no amount of hard freezing will fix.
- Freezing"Freeze" meant a hand-cranked pail packed with cracked ice and rock salt. Any modern churn works; 20-30 minutes to soft-serve consistency, then two to three hours in the freezer to firm.
- TextureWhole milk with no cream and no starch freezes hard and icy. Replacing a cup of the milk with heavy cream, or using six egg yolks in place of four whole eggs, gives a scoopable result.
- Lemon juiceThe suggestion is a good one, but add it at the end and sparingly — a tablespoon or two. Acid in a warm milk custard encourages curdling.
- YieldAbout a quart and a half, serving eight.
Frozen custards like this one belong to the moment when pineapple stopped being a luxury centrepiece and became a pantry item. By the later nineteenth century commercial canning in the West Indies and, from about 1900, Hawaii had put sweetened pineapple and its juice within reach of an ordinary household, and cookbooks carried numbers of pineapple ices, sherbets, fritters and salads. The recipe also shows the domestic ice-cream freezer taken for granted: a churn packed with ice and rock salt was standard equipment in a well-run kitchen, and "freeze" needed no more explanation than "bake" did. What the period cook did not know is the chemistry that makes this particular pairing tricky — bromelain was not isolated and named until the late nineteenth century.