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Pineapple Torte
2 C sifted flour. ½ C butter 3 egg yolks, slightly beaten 1 heaping t baking powder Mix and bake in shallow tin like a pie-crust, not too brown. Then mix and boil together until thick: 1 can grated pineapple 1 C sugar 2 T cornstarch 3 egg whites, beaten Cool and add beaten whites of 3 eggs. Pour into crust, place in moderate oven till filling sets. Serve with whipped cream.
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe, typed for cooks who already knew what a torte crust was. The ingredient list has clearly lost a line or two in printing, so read it with a skeptical eye before you start.
- The crust list is incompleteThe butter reads 1/2 cup, as the printed page gives it, but no flour or sugar is listed at all, yet the instruction says to bake the mixture like a pie-crust. A workable reconstruction, though the recipe gives no basis for the amounts, is a pressed shortbread-style crust of about 1/2 cup butter, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup sugar, the yolks and the baking powder.
- Egg whites appear twiceThey are listed among the ingredients to be boiled and then again as an addition after cooling. Only the second is right: fold the beaten whites into the cooled pineapple filling. Whites boiled into the mixture would curdle into threads.
- Moderate oven350F. Bake the crust at the same heat only until it is set and barely coloured — "not too brown" matters, because it goes back into the oven a second time with the filling.
- The cornstarch must actually boilCornstarch does not reach full thickening power until the mixture bubbles for a minute or so. Pull it early and the filling will slacken as it cools and weep.
- Canned grated pineapple"1 can" is unspecified; period cans of grated pineapple came in more than one size, so a 20 oz can of crushed pineapple in juice is a reasonable modern stand-in. Use canned, not fresh — fresh pineapple's bromelain digests protein and will keep an egg-set filling from firming, while canning heat destroys it.
- Cool before foldingLet the thickened pineapple come down to lukewarm before the whites go in, or they deflate on contact and you lose the light body the torte depends on.
- How long the second bake runsFifteen to twenty minutes at 350F, until the filling no longer trembles at the centre. It sets further as it cools.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only a "shallow tin" and gives no yield; a standard shallow round tin will serve six to eight. The whipped cream is called for in the recipe itself and the filling is sharp enough to want it.
Church and ladies'-aid cookbooks from the early twentieth century are full of pineapple, and the reason is the can. Commercial canning of Hawaiian pineapple expanded rapidly in the first decades of the 1900s, putting a tropical fruit within reach of a northern kitchen in February, and cooks used it hard — in salads, in gelatin moulds, and in filled cakes like this one. "Torte" in books of this kind often means not a Viennese layered gateau but a shallow pressed crust with a cooked fruit filling, a form generally traced to German and Central European baking traditions carried into the region by immigrant families and steadily simplified. The compression of this recipe — no flour listed, ingredients running together, instructions assuming prior knowledge — is typical of the genre.