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Pineapple Pie (Can crushed pineapple T)
½ can crushed pineapple 1 T cornstarch 1 egg yolk Juice ½ lemon-salt 1/2 C sugar 14 C water Cook in double boiler until thick. Bake crust and add filling.
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe, typed tightly enough that several fractions have lost their slashes. Read it as a stovetop cornstarch pie filling poured into a fully baked shell.
- Decoding the amountsThe fractions are mangled in the original typesetting: "Juice 12 lemon" is the juice of half a lemon, and "14 C water" is a quarter cup of water. "1½ can crushed pineapple" is genuinely ambiguous — mid-century cans ran roughly 8 oz, 20 oz and 29 oz, so this could be anything from about 12 oz to well over 40 oz of fruit. Around 20 oz of crushed pineapple, undrained, is probably what one 9-inch shell wants.
- AbbreviationsT is a tablespoon, C is a cup. The salt is an unmeasured pinch, run together with the lemon in the original line.
- One tablespoon of cornstarch is thinThat is enough to thicken a cup or so of liquid, not a full large can of pineapple with its syrup. Drain the fruit, measure the juice, and use about 1 tablespoon cornstarch per cup of total liquid — closer to 3 tablespoons for a 20 oz can.
- The hinge: cook the starch outCornstarch needs to reach a full simmer to lose its raw taste and set properly, and a double boiler barely gets there. Cook it until it turns glossy and thickly coats the spoon, then hold it a minute or two longer; pineapple's acid also weakens starch, so undercooked filling will slump when sliced.
- Temper the yolkWhisk a little of the hot mixture into the beaten yolk before returning it to the pan, then cook a further two to three minutes so the egg thickens rather than scrambles.
- Blind baking"Bake crust" means the shell goes in empty and comes out fully baked; the recipe gives no temperature or timing. Modern practice is to line and weight it, bake hot (around 400–425F) for about 15 minutes, then remove the weights and continue until the base is dry and golden. A raw shell will not cook under a cooked filling.
- The spare whiteThe recipe uses only the yolk. The white is presumably meant for a meringue — beaten with 2 tablespoons sugar, spread over the hot filling and browned at 350F for about 15 minutes.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, six to eight slices. Chill at least three hours before cutting; served warm it will run.
Cookbooks of this kind ran on the can opener, and canned crushed pineapple was one of its great beneficiaries — Hawaiian pineapple canning scaled up sharply in the first decades of the twentieth century, and by the time volumes like this were compiled the fruit was cheap, shelf-stable and available well inland year round. It was a pantry dessert, not an exotic one. The construction is the standard cornstarch-and-yolk cream filling in a pre-baked shell, the same template that produced lemon and butterscotch pies in the same sort of book, with fruit and its syrup standing in for milk. The extreme compression of the text is typical of contributed recipes, which were written for neighbors who already knew the method and needed only the proportions.