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Pineapple Syrup
Slice, pare, and dice three pounds of pineapple. Place in preserving kettle, add one quart of water and one pound of sugar. Cook till very soft, when the fruit should be mashed and strained. Replace in kettle and to each pint of juice add one pound of sugar and cook to a rich syrup. Bottle when hot and cork tightly and it will be ready for use at any time for sauces or drinks.
A two-stage syrup: the fruit is first stewed with a light sugar solution to draw out the juice, then the strained juice is reduced with its own weight in sugar. The sugar ratios matter more than the timings.
- Preserving kettleA wide, heavy, unlined-copper or enamelled pan with sloping sides. Any wide non-reactive pot works; width matters because evaporation, not time, decides when the syrup is done.
- Three pounds of pineappleProbably the weight before paring, though the recipe does not actually say; roughly one large or two small fresh pineapples. After peeling, coring and dicing, expect only about half to two-thirds of that as usable fruit.
- YieldThe original gives none, and it cannot be pinned down closely: it depends on how much juice the fruit gives up and how far you reduce it. Somewhere between one and two quarts.
- "To each pint of juice add one pound of sugar"Measure the strained juice properly before adding sugar; guessing here is what produces either a thin syrup that ferments or a hard candy. A pound of granulated sugar is about 2.25 cups.
- Cook to a rich syrupThe recipe gives no temperature; on a modern thermometer a rich syrup is usually reckoned at around 220-222F, or judged by a spoonful sheeting slowly off the edge rather than running. Cooked much beyond that it will be markedly thicker and more likely to crystallise as it cools.
- StrainingMash and press the softened fruit through a fine sieve rather than a jelly bag if you want body; a bag gives a clearer syrup but leaves a good deal of flavour behind. Fresh pineapple's bromelain is destroyed by this cooking, so the syrup will not curdle dairy or refuse to set with gelatine.
- BottlingHot-filling into corked bottles was the standard of the day and relies on sugar and pineapple's high acidity to keep. For modern practice, fill sterilised jars or bottles to within a half inch, seal, and either process in a boiling water bath or simply refrigerate and use within a couple of months. Discard anything showing mould or a fizz.
- UseDilute with still or sparkling water for a drink, or pour over puddings, ices and rice. It also glazes ham well.
Fruit syrups belong to the era before commercial soft drinks, when a household kept bottled sweetened juices to make what were called shrubs, cordials and "summer drinks" from the pantry. Pineapple appears in American cookbooks in quantity only from the later nineteenth century, when steamships and then refrigerated rail brought Caribbean fruit within reach of ordinary cooks; before that it was a luxury associated with hospitality, an association often said to lie behind the carved pineapples that became a stock architectural ornament on doorways and bedposts, though the story belongs more to decorating tradition than to documented practice. A recipe like this one, working through three pounds of fresh fruit for the sake of the juice alone, reflects a moment when pineapple had become cheap enough to cook down but was still special enough to be worth preserving for the winter.