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Pineapple Frappe
2 cups water 1 cup sugar Juice 3 lemons 2 cups ice-water 1 can grated pineapple or 1 pineapple shredded Make a syrup by boiling water and sugar fifteen minutes; add pineapple and lemon juice; cool, strain, add ice-water, and freeze to a mush, using equal parts ice and salt. If fresh fruit is used, more sugar will be required.
A frappé is frozen only to a coarse slush, not churned smooth, so the object is large loose crystals rather than a dense ice. Everything here scales easily and the only real technique is the freezing.
- Freezing without a churnPour the strained mixture into a shallow metal pan and put it in the freezer, then stir and scrape the crystals in from the sides every 30 minutes until it is uniformly slushy, about 3 to 4 hours. The ice-and-salt bath in the original is a hand-cranked freezer packed for speed; equal parts ice and salt gives a very cold, fast set, which suits a mush but would make a grainy ice cream.
- The syrupFifteen minutes at a boil is longer than needed simply to dissolve sugar; it concentrates the 2 cups of water into a heavier syrup, which lowers the freezing point and helps keep the frappe from setting rock-hard. How much water you lose will depend on your pan and heat, so judge by eye rather than to a fixed figure.
- Add the fruit off the heatPineapple and lemon juice go in after boiling stops. Boiling them dulls the fresh acidity that carries this dish, and long cooking flattens pineapple to a canned-fruit flavour.
- Canned grated pineappleThe recipe says only 'a can'. A modern 20-oz can is a reasonable stand-in. Use the packing liquid as part of the mixture, and cut the sugar slightly if it is a heavy syrup.
- Fresh pineappleThe note about more sugar is real: a ripe pineapple varies widely in acid. Shred it on the coarse side of a box grater over a bowl to catch the juice, taste the mixture before freezing, and add sugar until it is a little sweeter than you want, since freezing mutes sweetness.
- StrainingThe recipe directs you to strain, which gives a clear, drinkable frappe; leaving the pulp in will give more body and a rougher texture.
- Yield and servingRoughly 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 quarts, six to eight servings. Serve in stemmed glasses immediately after the last stirring, or spoon it over a plain steamed or cottage pudding.
Frappe, from the French frapper, to strike, and by extension used of iced drinks, appears in American cookbooks by the late nineteenth century as the lightest member of the ice family: water, sugar, fruit juice, frozen only to a slush and eaten with a spoon. The line between a sauce, an ice and a beverage was thinner then than now, and a cold fruit slush was a respectable thing to send to table with a hot pudding. Canned grated pineapple, which the recipe offers first, is the telling detail: Hawaiian and Singapore canneries were making pineapple an increasingly available pantry item in the early twentieth century.