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Pineapple Pudding
pulp from one pineapple 1 cup sugar 4 eggs ½ teaspoon salt Mix sugar, eggs and pineapple; bake in slow oven until set. Unmold, garnish with beaten cream, the leaves of the pineapple and cherries. 1 cup scalded milk cup soft bread crumbs cup grated cocoanut 2 egg yolks
A baked pineapple custard, printed here with an ingredient list that has partly collapsed in the original typesetting. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- The garbled second listThe four lines beginning "1 cup scalded milk" belong to a different pudding (a coconut custard) that has run into this one, and two of its quantities have lost their fractions. Treat the pineapple pudding as the first block only: pineapple pulp, sugar, eggs, salt.
- How much pulpOne pineapple, peeled, cored and grated or crushed, gives roughly 2 to 2½ cups of pulp and juice. Canned crushed pineapple, drained of most of its syrup, substitutes directly at that volume; reduce the sugar to about ¾ cup if the canned fruit is packed in syrup.
- Slow ovenAbout 300F (a period 'slow oven' is reckoned anywhere from roughly 250F to 325F). Custards want gentle heat; much above 325F the egg proteins tighten and squeeze out liquid, and the pudding will weep when you unmold it.
- Water bath and donenessBake the buttered mold standing in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up its side. It is done when the center reaches 170-175F, or when a knife slid in an inch from the edge comes out clean and the middle still trembles slightly. Expect 50 to 70 minutes depending on the mold.
- BromelainFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests protein and would keep the custard slack if it were left standing raw. Mix and get it into the oven promptly; the enzyme is inactivated as the custard heats through. Canned pineapple has already been heat-treated and poses no problem.
- UnmoldingCool to room temperature, then chill thoroughly before turning out. A warm egg custard has very little structure and will slump on the plate.
- Beaten creamHeavy cream whipped to soft peaks, unsweetened or barely sweetened. The pudding is already sweet at a cup of sugar to one pineapple.
- GarnishThe crown of leaves is decorative only, not edible. Wash it well and set it on the plate rather than in the pudding. The cherries were most likely candied or maraschino.
- YieldSix servings from a 1½-quart mold.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, was one of the many cookbooks issued by a confectionery manufacturer to sell chocolate and cocoa, and it carries a full complement of ordinary desserts alongside the chocolate work. The recipe's showy finish, with the crown of leaves and cherries set around a turned-out mold, reflects the period's taste for presenting fruit desserts as reconstructed versions of the whole fruit. The stray coconut-custard ingredients that follow appear to be a compositor's error, the sort of thing that survives in volumes of this kind.