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Pineapple Ice Cream
Make as in Introductory Recipes and let cool. Meantime have ready grated pineapple-one pint to each quart of cream and milk. Let it stand in a little sugar and lemon or orange juice. Partially freeze the cream before adding fruit, then stir it in and finish the process. The reserved pineapple syrup may be substituted for the fruit. In this case a little dissolved gelatine may be used.
This is a fruit-addition note rather than a standalone recipe: it assumes you have already made the plain ice cream base from the book's introductory section, and tells you how to fold pineapple into it. A few things need translating, and one piece of pineapple chemistry the author could not have known about.
- The missing base"Make as in Introductory Recipes" means the book's standard ice cream mixture — a cooked custard or a scalded cream-and-milk base, cooled thoroughly before freezing. Any modern custard base built on a quart of cream and milk will take the fruit quantity given here.
- Bromelain is the hingeFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that attacks dairy protein and gelatine. Raw grated pineapple stirred into a custard can turn it thin, grainy and faintly bitter, and it will stop the gelatine in the syrup variation from setting at all. Heat the grated fruit and its juice to a simmer for a few minutes and cool it before use, or use canned pineapple, which has already been heat-treated.
- One pint to each quartA pint of grated pineapple is about 2 cups, perhaps two-thirds of a medium fruit. Against a quart of cream and milk that is a generous proportion — the finished ice cream will be strongly fruited.
- "Let it stand in a little sugar"The recipe gives no quantity; a workable reading is 2 to 4 tablespoons of sugar per pint of fruit, plus the juice of half a lemon or a whole small orange, left half an hour. The sugar draws out juice and the acid keeps the colour bright; the sugar also helps keep the ice crystals soft.
- Why add the fruit lateAdding fruit to a fully liquid base dilutes it and slows freezing; the sugar and water in the pineapple depress the freezing point. Churn until the base is thick and slushy — soft-serve stage — then stir the fruit in and continue. In a modern machine this means about two-thirds of the churn time.
- The syrup variationIf you use reserved pineapple syrup instead of the fruit, you are adding sugar and water with no solids, so the mixture freezes softer. The "little dissolved gelatine" is there for body: about 1 teaspoon of powdered gelatine softened in cold water and dissolved into the warm base, and again the syrup must have been boiled or it will not gel.
- Freezing equipmentThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and coarse salt, about three parts ice to one part salt by volume, with the dasher turned steadily. A modern churn does the same work; either way, ripen the finished ice cream in the freezer for an hour or two before serving.
- YieldA quart of cream and milk plus a pint of sweetened fruit gives roughly 1½ quarts, enough for eight to ten servings.
Pineapple was, for most of the nineteenth century, the emblematic luxury fruit — grown under glass in English pineries at ruinous cost, or shipped from the Caribbean and Hawaii and sold whole at prices that made it a centrepiece rather than an ingredient. What changed the fruit's reach was canning: commercial pineapple packing in Hawaii expanded sharply around the turn of the twentieth century, and canned slices and syrup put the flavour within reach of ordinary households year round. The recipe casually offers "the reserved pineapple syrup" as an alternative to the fruit, though whether that syrup came from a tin, from home-preserved fruit, or from macerating the fruit itself is not something the text tells us. The instruction to partially freeze the cream before adding fruit may reflect the conditions of hand churning, when every degree of dilution meant more turning of the crank.