Home › The Pineapple › Pineapple Pudding or Pie Filling
Pineapple Pudding or Pie Filling
Slice, pare, and chop a pineapple, which if not thoroughly tender and sweet should stand an hour with sugar liberally sprinkled over it. Arrange in a buttered pudding-dish slices of bread, over which pour the juice from the apple and sugar. Beat the yolks of three eggs with half a cup of sugar, adding last the whites, which should have been beaten separately. (A tablespoon of white wine and half a cup of chopped almonds will improve this.) Pour over the juicesoaked slices and bake. The pudding minus the bread may be used as pie-filling.
A late-Victorian bread pudding built on a foamy egg-and-sugar topping rather than a milk custard. It is simple, but the original gives no oven temperature, no timing and no yield, and one word in it is a misprint.
- "The juice from the apple"Read as the pineapple; most likely a printer's slip. The instruction means the sweetened juice drawn out of the chopped fruit while it stood with sugar, poured over the bread slices. The recipe does not say what becomes of the chopped fruit itself.
- The hinge: the eggs are the whole structureThere is no milk or cream here, so the three eggs and the beaten whites are the only thing binding the dish. Fold the whites in rather than stirring, and get it into the oven at once, or the foam collapses and you are left with sweet wet bread.
- OvenThe original says only "bake". A moderate oven, about 350F, works: roughly 35-40 minutes in a shallow dish, until the top is set and lightly coloured and a knife in the centre comes out clean. Higher heat browns the egg foam before the interior sets.
- Choosing and prepping the fruit"Slice, pare, and chop" assumes a whole fresh pineapple: cut off top and base, pare the rind deep enough to remove the eyes, quarter it and cut away the fibrous core before chopping. An average pineapple gives about 3 cups of fruit. Canned pineapple, drained, works but needs less added sugar.
- Standing with sugarThe hour with sugar is not optional for underripe fruit; it draws out juice and softens the flesh. A truly ripe pineapple can go straight in, though even then twenty minutes with a couple of tablespoons of sugar gives you syrup to soak the bread.
- BromelainRaw pineapple contains an enzyme that breaks down protein, which is why fresh pineapple will not set gelatine. Baking destroys it, so the eggs set normally here, but do not let the assembled dish sit at room temperature for an hour before it goes in the oven.
- The breadUse a firm white loaf, slightly stale, crusts on or off as you like. Modern soft sandwich bread turns to paste in the syrup; a day-old country or brioche-style loaf holds its slices.
- Almonds and wineBlanched sweet almonds, chopped, not almond meal. The tablespoon of white wine is a flavouring only; a dry sherry or Madeira suits the dish as well.
- As pie fillingOmitting the bread leaves a loose fruit-and-egg mixture that will soak a raw shell. Blind-bake the crust first, then fill and bake in a moderate oven until just set.
Pineapples reached American tables in quantity only after steamship routes made Caribbean fruit affordable in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; before that they were a hothouse luxury, and it is often said, though on thin evidence, that they were more often displayed as a centrepiece than eaten. Fruit-recipe collections of this period are full of pineapple in every form — preserved, in ices, in fritters — precisely because the ingredient was newly within reach of an ordinary household and cooks needed telling what to do with it. The pudding itself belongs to the much older family of bread puddings, the standard thrifty use for a stale loaf, here dressed up with an egg foam, almonds and a spoonful of wine in the manner of a Victorian company dessert. The note that the same mixture serves as pie filling is characteristic of these books.