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Pineapple Cream Dessert
1/2 cup rice 2 slices Hawaiian pineapple 1 cup cream 2 tablespoons sugar Boil the rice until tender but not broken. Drain, and dry for about five minutes in a moderate oven and cool. Cut the pineapple into small pieces, and add the sugar. Stir the rice occasionally, as it is cooling, to prevent its packing. When the mixture is thoroughly cold, whip the cream until stiff. Heavy cream is preferable, but thin cream may be made to whip if thoroughly chilled. Fold the whipped cream into the mixture.
A cold rice-and-cream dessert of the sort that filled the fruit chapters of early twentieth-century vegetarian cookery. It is straightforward, but two of its assumptions — that canned pineapple comes in slices and that thin cream can be whipped — no longer hold.
- The hinge: get the rice completely cold and looseWarm rice will melt whipped cream into soup, and rice left undisturbed sets into a solid cake. Stir it every few minutes as it cools, and chill it thoroughly before folding anything in.
- Rice and quantityHalf a cup of dry rice is meant here; use a medium- or short-grain white rice, which stays tender rather than firm when cold. Boil it in plenty of water, as for pasta, then drain — this is not an absorption method.
- "Dry for about five minutes in a moderate oven"A moderate oven is usually reckoned at somewhere around 350-375F. Five minutes in a shallow pan drives off surface water so the grains stay separate; it is not meant to toast or colour them.
- "Hawaiian pineapple"This means canned pineapple, and by the 1910s much of the canned pineapple on the American market came from Hawaii, sold in rings. Two slices is roughly 1/2 cup chopped fruit; drain it well or the juice will thin the cream.
- If you use fresh pineappleFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protein-digesting enzyme that can make dairy taste bitter and go slack on standing. Canned fruit is heat-treated, which deactivates it, so it is the safer choice for a dessert that sits in the refrigerator.
- "Thin cream may be made to whip"Ignore this. Modern light cream runs around 18-20 percent fat and half-and-half around 10-12 percent; neither will whip reliably, however cold. Use heavy or whipping cream at 35 percent or more, well chilled, with a chilled bowl.
- SugarTwo tablespoons is modest and assumes syrup-packed fruit. Taste the pineapple first; juice-packed fruit may want a little more, and a few drops of vanilla is a period-appropriate addition.
- Yield and servingSomewhere around 3 to 4 cups, enough for four small glasses. Serve within a few hours -- the cream slowly weeps and the rice firms up in the cold.
Cold rice folded into whipped cream with fruit resembles the elaborate French riz à l'impératrice, which set the same mixture in gelatine and turned it out of a mould; the home-kitchen version simply skips the mould. The specification "Hawaiian pineapple" dates the book only very loosely. Commercial canning in the islands expanded rapidly in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the canned ring — uniform, sweet, available inland year round — became a fixture of American dessert writing at a time when fresh pineapple was still a luxury with a short season and a great deal of waste.