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Pineapple Ice
For one can grated pineapple or one pint fresh fruit use one pint each of sugar and water and juice of one lemon. Mix and freeze. Or see Introductory Recipes.
A water ice in the plainest form: fruit, syrup, acid, freeze. The proportions are sound, but the original assumes a hand-crank freezer and a cook who knows what "mix and freeze" involves.
- The syrup ratio is the hingeA pint of sugar to a pint of water is roughly 2 cups sugar to 2 cups water, which is what keeps the finished ice scoopable rather than a solid block. Cutting the sugar substantially will give you a pineapple brick.
- Dissolve the sugar firstStir the sugar into the water until no crystals remain (gently heating the two together and then cooling completely is the easiest way) before adding the fruit and lemon. Syrup that is not thoroughly chilled will not freeze properly in a machine.
- Canned versus freshCans of grated pineapple were commonly sold in sizes in the region of 16-20 oz, often in syrup; modern crushed pineapple in juice is less sweet, so taste before freezing. Fresh fruit should be grated or pulsed to a coarse pulp, not a smooth puree -- some fibre is wanted.
- Strain if you likePineapple fibre freezes into stringy threads that catch on the tongue. Pressing the pulp through a coarse sieve and keeping the juice plus a little pulp gives a cleaner ice; leaving it whole is closer to what the book intends.
- Freezing without a crank freezerAn ice cream machine handles this in 20-25 minutes. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal pan and stir hard with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours, breaking up crystals as they form.
- "Introductory Recipes"The cross-reference sends the reader to the book's general freezing instructions elsewhere in the volume, which this entry declines to repeat; what they contain is not stated here.
- YieldAbout 1.5 quarts, serving six to eight. It is at its best within a day or two; longer storage coarsens the texture.
- If you extend it with dairyFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease which will keep gelatin from setting and can spoil a dairy base. Canned pineapple has been heated, which deactivates the enzyme, so it poses no such problem.
Water ices — fruit, sugar syrup and acid, frozen without cream or eggs — were the everyday counterpart to the richer cream ices in American household cookery, cheap enough to serve at church suppers and light enough to appear between courses at a formal dinner. That this recipe offers "one can grated pineapple" as the first option, ahead of fresh fruit, dates it: commercially canned pineapple became widely and cheaply available in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century as the Hawaiian canneries scaled up, though the book itself offers fresh fruit as an equal alternative. The lemon juice is doing real work here, not just seasoning; pineapple loses much of its brightness when frozen, and a citrus edge was often added to an ice to keep the flavour from going flat on a cold tongue.