Home › Pudding Sauces › Pineapple Cream
Pineapple Cream
2 cups water 1 cup sugar 1 can grated pineapple 2 cups cream Make syrup by boiling sugar and water fifteen minutes; strain, cool, add pineapple, and freeze to a mush. Fold in whip from cream; let stand thirty minutes before serving. Serve in frappe glasses and garnish with candied pineapple.
A frozen pineapple cream, closer to a sorbet-and-whipped-cream frappe than to a poured sauce, despite its place among the pudding sauces. The one thing that decides success is the texture of the ice before the cream goes in: freeze it to a soft mush, not a solid block, or the whipped cream will not fold in evenly.
- "Whip from cream"Period cooks whipped cream in a deep bowl and skimmed the stiff foam off the top as it formed, returning the thin liquid to be whipped again. With modern heavy cream (36 percent fat) simply whip 2 cups to soft peaks and use the lot.
- The syrupFifteen minutes at a boil reduces 2 cups water and 1 cup sugar noticeably and concentrates it; do not shorten it much or the mixture freezes hard and icy. Cool the syrup completely before adding the fruit.
- Canned pineappleCan sizes were not standardised in this period and the recipe does not say which one is meant; 'grated' pineapple corresponds to what is now sold as crushed. Around 20 ounces of crushed pineapple in juice, undrained, is a reasonable reading.
- Fresh pineapple insteadIf you substitute fresh, add it to the hot syrup for a minute or two first. Raw pineapple's bromelain turns dairy unpleasantly bitter over time; brief heat deactivates it.
- Freezing without a crank freezerPour the fruit syrup into a shallow metal pan and freeze, stirring and breaking up the edges every 20 to 30 minutes until it is a coarse slush, about 2 hours. An ice cream machine run short of its full cycle does the same job.
- The thirty-minute standThe recipe says only to let it stand thirty minutes before serving; this reads like the familiar ripening rest. Put the folded mixture into the freezer, not on the counter, so it firms slightly without setting solid.
- Frappe glassesSmall stemmed glasses of about 5 ounces. Any wine or coupe glass works, chilled first.
- YieldHard to fix precisely, but the folded mixture will run to something over 5 cups, serving six to eight in glasses of that size.
Pineapple was one of the great beneficiaries of American commercial canning: in the early twentieth century Hawaiian and Singapore packs helped turn an expensive imported fruit into a pantry staple, and cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s use canned grated pineapple freely in ices, fillings and sauces where fresh fruit would once have been unthinkable. Its appearance in a chapter of pudding sauces reflects a broader habit of the period, when the line between a sauce and a dessert in its own right was thin -- a half-frozen cream could be spooned over a plain steamed pudding or served alone in a stemmed glass with candied fruit on top. The "whip from cream" instruction dates the recipe as clearly as the canned fruit does, belonging to an era of hand whisks and bowls set in ice.