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Pineapple Jam
Grate the fruit and place in preserving kettle with sugar, pound for pound. Let heat gradually for twenty minutes then simmer for nearly an hour. Less time may be sufficient as much depends upon quality of fruit. If extremely juicy some of the liquor should be strained from the fruit before cooking.
PRESERVED PINEAPPLE (Sliced and Cooked) Cut in slices, then pare the fruit, placing alternate layers of pineapple and sugar (pound for pound) in preserving kettle. To each pound of fruit add one-half cup of water, pouring this in after fruit is placed with sugar. Heat to boiling point, then take out the slices and spread in the sun on dishes. Meantime gently boil the syrup for forty minutes. At the end of this time place pineapple again in kettle and cook all together for twenty minutes. Then remove the fruit, placing it in jars and pouring on it the boiling syrup. Seal at once.
PRESERVED PINEAPPLE (Uncooked and Grated) In the North, where the climate is less trying to preserved fruits than in the extreme South, pineapple may be grated and preserved uncooked for culinary or medicinal use. Use one pound of sugar to each pound of grated fruit and let stand twelve hours in covered jar in a cold place, if possible, on ice. Then place in jars which (with tops and bands) have been thoroughly sterilised. As an additional safeguard the tops may be dipped in sealing wax or paraffine. CANNED PINEAPPLE (Without Sugar) Slice, pare, and heat thoroughly the ripe pineapples to be canned. When boiling remove and place immediately in sealed jars.
CANNED PINEAPPLE (With Sugar) Use three-fourths pound of sugar to each pound of shredded fruit and to each pint of sugar one teacup of water. Heat through and when boiling, can.
Five pineapple preserves from a period when "seal at once" was considered sufficient processing. The cooked jam is straightforward old-fashioned work; the canning directions that follow it are not usable, and the reasons are set out below.
- Why the canning steps failEvery one of the four preserving and canning methods here relies on open-kettle sealing: fruit into a jar (hot in three of them, cold in the uncooked pack), lid on, no processing in a boiling-water bath and no stated time or temperature. Air, mould spores and yeasts enter as the jar is filled, and the vacuum formed by cooling is unreliable. Use a current tested water-bath procedure for any pineapple you intend to store.
- The uncooked grated packRaw fruit held twelve hours with an equal weight of sugar and then sealed cold is a fermentation culture, not a preserve. Sterilising the jar does nothing about the organisms already on the fruit, and wax or paraffin over the lid seals them in rather than out. The book's own caveat about the "extreme South" suggests the method was unreliable in warm conditions.
- "Canned pineapple (without sugar)"Sugar-free fruit sealed straight from the kettle has neither the sugar concentration of a jam nor any heat processing in the jar. This is the weakest method on the page and should not be attempted in this form.
- Sun-drying the slicesThe sliced preserve has you lift boiling fruit onto dishes and leave it in the open air while the syrup reduces for forty minutes. That is forty minutes of warm, wet, uncovered fruit — an obsolete step, apparently intended to firm the slices, and a straightforward contamination route.
- Pound for poundEqual weights of sugar and fruit is the classic preserving ratio: roughly 2 1/4 cups granulated sugar per pound of prepared pineapple. The last recipe's "three-fourths pound of sugar to each pound of shredded fruit and to each pint of sugar one teacup of water" mixes weight and volume and is genuinely ambiguous — a pint of sugar is about 14 oz, and a teacup of the period is roughly 3/4 cup.
- Preserving kettleA wide, shallow, unlined copper or heavy enamelled pan. A broad stainless or enamelled pot of at least 6 quarts does the same job; the width matters more than the depth, since evaporation is what sets the jam.
- The fruit itselfPineapple sold today is often sweeter and juicier than the fruit reaching a Northern kitchen a century ago, so the book's note that "less time may be sufficient" may well apply. Fresh pineapple also contains bromelain, which is why raw pineapple will not set with gelatine — heat destroys it.
- GratingGrating means taking the flesh down to the fibrous core and discarding the core, not shredding the whole fruit. The core is edible but stringy and will leave threads through the finished jam.
Pineapple appears at this length in an American fruit book of the early 1900s because it had just become an everyday item rather than a luxury: refrigerated rail and steamer shipments from Florida and Cuba put whole fruit on Northern grocers' shelves cheaply, while the Hawaiian canning trade supplied canned pineapple, and the household preserver was suddenly working with a tropical fruit that spoiled fast and travelled badly. The instruction to keep uncooked grated pineapple "for culinary or medicinal use" reflects a folk reliance on pineapple juice for sore throats and as a digestive — the fruit's protein-splitting enzyme was isolated in 1891 and named bromelain shortly after, and the folk use of raw pineapple to tenderise meat and settle the stomach rests on the same property. The regional caveat about the "extreme South" is worth noting too: before mechanical refrigeration was general, the practical difference between a preserve that kept and one that fermented was often simply how cold the pantry got.