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Pineapple, Lemon or Limeade
For each glass to be served take one tablespoon each of pineapple and lemon or lime juice, and a half-teaspoon of grated orange-peel. Sugar to taste. Fill up the glass with hot or iced water.
A single-glass formula rather than a batch recipe, which makes it easy to scale but leaves the sweetening and dilution entirely to the cook. A few notes on proportions and on the orange peel, which is doing more work here than it looks.
- Scale per glassOne tablespoon each of pineapple and citrus juice, topped up with water, is a light drink by modern standards (the recipe does not say how large a glass it assumes). Two tablespoons of each per glass gives something closer to what many people now expect from a lemonade.
- Grated orange-peelHalf a teaspoon of grated zest per glass is a large amount of oil and will float in gritty specks. Grate it directly over the glass so the oils go in, or steep the zest in the sugar for ten minutes and strain it out.
- Sugar to tasteGranulated sugar will not dissolve properly in iced water. Make a simple syrup (equal weights sugar and water, warmed until clear) and add it by the spoonful, or mix the sugar into the juice before the water goes in.
- Pineapple juiceJuice pressed or drained from fresh fruit is thinner, sharper and more perfumed than modern canned juice; period cooks may also have used the juice drained from canned pineapple. Canned juice works, but taste before sweetening, as some is packed sweetened.
- Hot or icedServed hot this is essentially a fruit tisane and the orange oil dominates; served iced the pineapple leads. If serving hot, do not boil the juice, which flattens the fresh aroma quickly.
- Fresh pineapple and gelatinUnrelated to this drink as written, but worth knowing if you press your own juice: raw pineapple contains bromelain, which will prevent a gelatin dessert from setting. Use fresh juice within a day or two.
Pineapple appears in American cookbooks of this period as a fruit newly within reach of ordinary households: refrigerated steamships and rail cars brought Caribbean fruit to northern cities in the 1880s and 1890s, and canning firms in Hawaii scaled up in the first years of the twentieth century, sending their fruit north in tins. The recipe itself belongs to a large family of "-ades" — lemonade, orangeade, currant-ade — that filled the space now occupied by bottled soft drinks, and which were also regarded as invalid drinks, hence the option of serving it hot. The grated orange-peel looks like a thrifty period habit: the peel carried flavour that the household had already paid for, though the motive can only be inferred.