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Pineapple Water Ice
Add two cups pineapple chopped and pressed through a sieve, with two tablespoons lemon juice, to Plain Water Ice.
A one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's Plain Water Ice in front of you. That base is a sugar syrup — roughly 4 cups water to 2 cups sugar, boiled briefly, cooled, and strained — and the proportions matter more than the pineapple does.
- Read the base recipe firstWithout the syrup this instruction is meaningless. Water ices of this era are typically built on a sugar syrup, boiled to dissolve and chilled thoroughly before freezing; check the book's own proportions. Too little sugar and the ice freezes into a solid block; too much and it never sets.
- Pressed through a sieveThis is the hinge. Pineapple fibre does not soften in the freezer and will read as stringy in the finished ice, so the pulp must genuinely be forced through a fine sieve or chinois, not merely blitzed. A blender alone leaves the fibre intact.
- Two cups pineappleMeasured as chopped fruit before sieving, which yields roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups of pulp and juice. A medium pineapple is enough.
- Fresh or cannedCanned pineapple in juice works and is usually sweeter; you may want to cut the lemon juice back and taste. Bromelain in fresh pineapple is irrelevant here since there is no dairy or gelatin to break down.
- Taste before freezingCold blunts both sweetness and acid, so the unfrozen mixture should taste slightly too sweet and slightly too sharp at room temperature. Adjust with lemon juice rather than more sugar.
- Freezing methodThe original assumes a hand-crank freezer packed with cracked ice and rock salt, about 3 parts ice to 1 part salt. An ice cream machine handles it directly; without one, freeze in a shallow pan and rake with a fork every 30 minutes for a granita texture.
- HardeningWater ices are best after an hour or two in the freezer to firm up, then given about 10 minutes at room temperature before serving. Straight from the churn they are slushy.
- YieldDepends on the volume of the base water ice, which is not given here; expect enough for eight to ten of the small glasses of the period.
Water ices — fruit, sugar, water, no dairy — were the lighter half of the frozen repertoire in American cookbooks of the early 1900s, served sometimes as a palate cleanser between courses and sometimes as dessert, while cream ices closed the meal. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company, follows the standard practice of giving one plain formula and then a run of variations that differ only in the fruit, which is why this entry is a single sentence. That pineapple appears among them as an everyday flavour rather than a luxury reflects the growth of canning and steamship trade that had by then made the fruit more widely available inland, in tins if not fresh.