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Pineapple Cream
2 cups water 1 cup sugar 1 pint can grated pineapple 2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 cups whip from cream Make a syrup of the sugar and water, add the grated pineapple and lemon juice. Freeze slightly, then add the whip from cream and continue freezing.
A still-frozen pineapple ice enriched with whipped cream, written for a hand-crank ice cream freezer. Nothing here is difficult, but two of the terms need translating before the proportions make sense.
- "Whip from cream"Older books whipped cream in a bowl and skimmed the stiff froth off the top as it formed, leaving the thinner cream below to be whipped again. Two cups of that skimmed whip is roughly what you get from about one cup of heavy cream beaten to soft-to-medium peaks; use it loose rather than stiff so it folds in without lumps.
- A pint can of grated pineappleThat is a 16 oz can, drained weight closer to 10-12 oz, and the syrup goes in with the fruit. Modern cans are labelled crushed rather than grated; a 20 oz can is the common size now, so hold back a few spoonfuls if you want the original balance.
- Fresh pineapple will not behaveCanned pineapple has been heated, which deactivates the bromelain. Fresh or frozen raw pineapple still carries the active enzyme, which can turn dairy bitter and loosen the mixture; if you want to use fresh fruit, cook it with the syrup first.
- "Freeze slightly"The base should be slushy and just holding a trail from the paddle before the cream goes in. Add it too early and it churns to butter grains; too late and you cannot fold it through the set mass.
- Without an ice cream machineFreeze the syrup mixture in a shallow metal pan, breaking up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes until it is a coarse slush, then fold in the whipped cream and freeze solid, stirring once more after an hour.
- Sweetness and settingOne cup of sugar to two cups of water plus canned syrup is a soft-freezing mixture by design; the sugar keeps it scoopable. Cutting the sugar much will give you a hard, icy block rather than a cream.
- Yield and servingAbout 1 1/2 quarts, serving eight. Let it stand five minutes out of a modern freezer, which generally holds a lower temperature than a salt-and-ice churn, before scooping.
Frozen desserts of this type sat between an ice and an ice cream: a fruit syrup frozen part way, then lightened with whipped cream, sometimes sold as a mousse depending on the book. Canned grated pineapple made the dish possible for ordinary households far from the tropics, and Hawaiian canneries had made it a cheap, reliable pantry staple by the early twentieth century, which is why it turns up so often in American dessert chapters of the period. Meatless cookery books of the period were variously aimed at households observing Lent or Friday abstinence and at readers following the vegetarian arguments then circulating in health and temperance circles, and a chapter of frozen desserts let the cook end a fish-and-vegetable dinner with something that felt like an occasion. The instruction to skim the whip from the cream, rather than beat the whole bowl, belongs to an era of unhomogenised milk, when the cream varied in richness from one delivery to the next.