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Pine-apple Water Ice
Ingredients.
One small Pine-apple, tinned or fresh.
One pint of Water, if tinned; One pint and a half of Water, if fresh fruit.
Six or eight ounces of Loaf Sugar according to syrup used.
One tablespoonful of Lemon-juice.
Peel, slice, and pound the pine-apple in a mortar; boil the water and sugar in a stewpan for ten minutes; strain into a basin; add the pineapple and the lemon-juice; strain, and when cold, freeze as usual.
A plain fruit sorbet built on a boiled sugar syrup. The only real decisions are how much sugar the finished mixture carries and how you freeze it.
- Imperial pintsThis is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz — about 2 1/2 US cups. The fresh-fruit version's pint and a half is roughly 3 3/4 cups.
- Sugar, and why the rangeSix to eight ounces of loaf sugar is roughly 7/8 to 1 1/8 cups of granulated. Use the lower end with tinned pineapple, since the canning syrup already sweetens the mix — the recipe's "according to syrup used" points the same way; use the higher end with fresh fruit. Sugar is also what keeps a water ice scoopable, so cutting it much below this gives a harder, icier block.
- Loaf sugarSold as a cone or hard block in the period and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct substitute.
- Pounding in a mortarA food processor or blender does this in seconds. Pineapple is fibrous, so run it longer than seems necessary before straining.
- StrainingThe recipe strains twice: once to clear the boiled syrup, and again after the pineapple goes in, which is the straining that matters for texture. Push the pulp firmly through a sieve with a ladle rather than letting it drain, or you throw away most of the flavour; a nylon sieve avoids any metallic taste from the acid fruit.
- Chill before freezing"When cold" means properly cold — refrigerate the mixture for several hours. A warm base churns badly and ends up coarse and icy.
- Freeze as usualIn the period this meant a pewter freezing pot packed in a wooden pail of crushed ice and coarse salt, worked with a spatula; hand-cranked freezers were also in use by the end of the century. An ice cream machine handles it directly. Without one, freeze in a shallow metal tray and break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes for about three hours.
- Fresh pineapple and dairyFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests protein. It is harmless in a water ice, but do not fold this base into cream or set it with gelatine — the gelatine will not hold and cream will turn thin and bitter.
- YieldRoughly a quart from the tinned version and rather more from the fresh, serving four to six as a dessert or more as a small ice between courses.
Water ices — fruit juice or purée frozen in a sugar syrup, with no cream or egg — were a fixture of the late Victorian and Edwardian dinner table, appearing either as a light dessert or as a palate-cleansing ice partway through a long menu. The alternative of "tinned or fresh" pineapple in the first line places the recipe after canned pineapple became widely available: fruit canned in the Straits Settlements from the 1880s, and later in Hawaii, reached British grocers cheaply in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and it was often a more convenient proposition than a fresh pineapple, which had been an expensive hothouse luxury and a centrepiece to be displayed rather than pounded in a mortar. The freezing itself was hard manual work in an ice pail packed with salt.