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Pineapple Sponge
One small fresh pineapple or a pint and a half can of the fruit, one small cup of sugar, half a package of granulated gelatine, one cup and a half of water, the whites of four eggs. Soak the gelatine in a half cup of water, until dissolved. Chop the pineapple, and put it, together with the juice, in a saucepan with the sugar and remainder of the water. Simmer ten minutes, add the gelatine, take from fire immediately, and strain into a basin. When partially cooled, add the whites of the eggs and heat until the mixture begins to thicken.
Pour into a mold, and set it away to harden. Serve with soft custard. -Mrs William Lansing.
A whipped gelatine "sponge" of the kind that filled the cold-dessert chapters of every turn-of-the-century household book. The method turns on two things the original does not spell out, and one of them makes the dish unsafe by current standards.
- The egg whites are never cookedFour raw whites are beaten into a syrup that has already been taken off the fire and "partially cooled," then chilled and served. Nothing in the process brings the whites near the temperature at which Salmonella is killed, and the finished sponge sits at room temperature while it is beaten and moulded. A current recipe using pasteurised product or a cooked meringue base should be used instead.
- The accompanying custard"Soft custard" is a stirred egg-and-milk sauce. The recipe gives no directions for it, so how far it was taken here is unknown.
- Fresh pineapple and gelatineRaw pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that digests gelatine and leaves the mould a puddle. The ten-minute simmer here is what deactivates it, which is why the fruit is cooked before the gelatine goes in rather than after. Canned pineapple is already heat-treated and carries no such risk.
- "Half a package of granulated gelatine"Package sizes were not standardised in this period and the amount is genuinely ambiguous. A modern envelope is a quarter ounce, so any conversion here is guesswork rather than arithmetic.
- "Heat until the mixture begins to thicken"Probably a compositor's error for beat. The whites are whipped into the cooling jelly so that air is trapped as it sets, which is what makes a sponge rather than a plain jelly.
- A pint and a half canRoughly three cups of fruit with its syrup, a little more than a modern 20 oz can.
- YieldRoughly six to eight servings by volume; the original gives none. It appears to assume a single decorative shape turned out at table with the custard poured around it.
Gelatine "sponges" and "whips" belong to the moment when packaged granulated gelatine, sold in boxes for pennies, put moulded desserts within reach of households that had never rendered calves' feet. Pineapple appears here because canning had made it a year-round staple: fruit that had been a hothouse curiosity or an expensive import in the 1870s was, by the end of the century, stacked in tins in ordinary grocers, and this recipe treats a fresh pineapple and a can of it as straightforward substitutes for one another in its first line. The attribution to Mrs. William Lansing reflects the contributed-recipe format of the period: readers sent in dishes from their own tables and were credited by their husbands' names, which was the ordinary form of address for a married woman in print at the time. The suggestion to serve it with soft custard belongs to an older habit of pairing a set or whipped sweet with a pouring sauce, the same logic that puts custard beside a trifle.