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Pineappleade
Boil the parings of pineapple (or with the chopped fruit), and allow the liquid to cool. Add juice of lemon or limes and sweeten to taste.
A thrift drink built from the trimmings, with no quantities given at all. The proportions below are a reasonable starting point rather than a reconstruction of the original.
- QuantitiesThe recipe specifies nothing. The parings and core of one medium pineapple simmered in about 4 cups of water, then strained, gives a little under a quart of infusion — enough for three or four glasses.
- Wash the fruit firstYou are extracting flavour from the outside of the skin, which has sat on a crate and been handled. Scrub the whole pineapple under running water before you cut it.
- Simmer, do not boil hardFifteen to twenty minutes at a bare simmer, covered, pulls out plenty of flavour. A long rolling boil drives off the volatile esters that make it smell like pineapple and leaves a flat, cooked-jam taste.
- Strain properlyPineapple skin is fibrous and the liquid will carry grit and stray bristles. Pass it through a fine sieve or a double layer of muslin while hot, then cool.
- Cool before adding lemonThe recipe has the liquid cool before the citrus goes in; whatever the original reason, it suits the drink, as citrus juice loses its brightness when it hits hot liquid. Juice of one lemon or two limes per quart is a fair benchmark.
- SweeteningSugar dissolves poorly in cold liquid. Either sweeten while the infusion is still warm, or stir in a simple syrup at the end; start at about 1/4 cup sugar per quart and taste, since canned-free ripe pineapple varies a great deal in sweetness.
- KeepingThis is an unpreserved fruit infusion. Refrigerate and drink within two days; serve over ice, and it takes soda water well if you want it long.
- The bromelain questionThe enzyme in raw pineapple that curdles dairy and prevents gelatin setting is destroyed by the boiling here, so the cooled liquid can be used with milk or gelatin without trouble.
Pineappleade belongs to a family of Victorian and Edwardian household drinks — lemonade, orangeade, raspberry vinegar — in which fruit was stretched with water and sugar, and to a still older habit of using what would otherwise be thrown away. Pineapple was expensive well into the nineteenth century, grown in heated British pineries or shipped from the Caribbean, and by the time steamships and Hawaiian plantations had brought the price down, the skin and core were still available to cooks who had used the flesh. Recipes of this kind rarely give quantities, reading less like instructions than like reminders: boil the parings, sharpen with citrus, sweeten to taste. The same principle turns up in the West Indies as a fermented drink, often called pineapple beer or tepache in Mexico, where the parings are left to work with sugar for a day or two instead of being boiled.