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Heavenly Hash
1 C heavy cream 1 t vanilla Nuts and white cherries may be used.
Cube the pineapple, add marshmallows, cut up, and let stand over night. 3 or 4 hours before serving add 1 C cream, whipped, and vanilla; also nuts and white cherries. if desired.
Doris Kaiser Linders.
Laura Mae Grummitt Mrs. F. J. Wagner.
Mrs. Signa Nelson adds 4 bananas cut in small pieces, and serves this with lady fingers.
A church-supper icebox salad of the marshmallow-and-whipped-cream school. The transcription has lost most of the ingredient list, so quantities for the two main components have to be inferred.
- The missing amountsOnly the cream (1 cup) and vanilla (1 teaspoon) survive with measurements; the pineapple and marshmallows are called for in the method with no quantity given. Similar recipes of the period pair a can of pineapple with something on the order of a half pound of marshmallows, but any figure here is a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- Marshmallows have changedMarshmallows of this period were generally firmer and drier than today's, which may be why they are cut up and left to stand overnight to soften into the pineapple juice. Modern marshmallows are softer and sweeter; miniatures work but slump faster.
- The overnight stand is the hingeThe overnight stand -- The standing time appears to be the point of the method rather than mere resting: the juice softens the cut marshmallows into a sticky mass that binds the whipped cream. Skip it and you are likely to get cream with marshmallow lumps in it.
- Drain the pineappleThe recipe's 'cube the pineapple' does not say whether fresh or canned is meant. If using canned, drain it well before combining or the finished dish weeps. Fresh pineapple carries bromelain, which over a long stand can thin cream and give it a bitter edge.
- White cherriesProbably light-fleshed cherries such as Royal Anne, or the undyed 'white' or 'blonde' maraschinos still sold in some markets; the book does not specify. Drain and blot them; ordinary red ones will streak the whole bowl pink.
- Fold, do not stirWhip the cream to soft peaks with the vanilla and fold it into the marshmallow-pineapple mass. Whipped stiff and beaten in, it deflates and the dessert turns soupy in the refrigerator.
- The three-to-four-hour windowAdding the cream well ahead of serving lets the whole thing set to a spoonable consistency. It is best eaten the day it is made; left much longer it tends to separate.
- Yield and servingWith no quantities given for the pineapple and marshmallows the yield cannot be fixed; a batch on the scale suggested above would serve roughly six to eight in small dishes. Mrs. Nelson's four bananas stretch it further and are served with lady fingers; add banana close to serving, as it browns.
Heavenly Hash belongs to the American age of the icebox dessert, when canned pineapple, commercial marshmallows and home refrigeration converged in the earlier twentieth century and produced a whole genre of sweet, pale, chilled fruit-and-cream mixtures. The name attached itself to several unrelated things — a chocolate-almond-marshmallow candy long associated with New Orleans, and this fruit dessert — with the common thread being marshmallow and the sense that a jumble of good things had been thrown together. Its presence in a congregational cookbook is characteristic: the dish is made from shelf-stable purchased goods, requires no oven, multiplies easily, and travels to a supper in the bowl it was mixed in. So is the way it is printed here, with four women's names appended and one of them, Mrs. Signa Nelson, credited with her own variation — these books recorded not a single authoritative recipe but the small differences between neighbors who all made the same thing.