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Pineapple Snowball
1 cup crushed pineapple 1 cup sugar 2 cups water 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 egg white, beaten stiff Shredded cocoanut (or macaroon crumbs) Mix ingredients (except cocoanut) in order named and freeze hard. Mold with tablespoon, roll in cocoanut and serve with crushed pineapple.
A pineapple water ice rolled into balls and dredged in coconut, written for a chapter of building-up diets. The method is straightforward, but the uncooked egg white is the sticking point, and the intended audience makes it worse rather than better.
- The raw egg whiteThe beaten white is folded in and then frozen; nothing in the recipe brings it to a temperature that would kill Salmonella, and freezing does not destroy the organism. Shell eggs of the period were assumed safe to eat raw as a matter of course, which is no longer the assumption.
- Who this was served toWho should avoid it -- Uncooked egg white is ruled out by current food-safety guidance for anyone vulnerable: the very young, the elderly, pregnant women and the immune-compromised. If you want a pineapple ice with a whipped-white body, work from a modern recipe written with pasteurised product in mind.
- Nothing else here is a hazardThe sugar syrup, pineapple, lemon juice and coconut are all sound, and the acidity of the fruit is high. The single problem is the untreated white.
- "Cocoanut"Simply the older spelling of coconut. In recipes of this period it generally means dried shredded or desiccated coconut, sold in packets.
- Macaroon crumbsThe alternative coating means dried, crushed macaroons of the period, almond or coconut, not the modern French macaron shell.
- "Freeze hard"The phrase belongs to the era of the hand-crank ice-cream freezer and the ice compartment of a mechanical refrigerator. It signals a texture firm enough to shape with a spoon, not a soft-scoop consistency.
- YieldRoughly a quart of mixture before freezing.
Pineapple snowballs belong to a family of moulded water ices that filled dessert pages in the decades either side of 1900: cold, sweet, acidic and easy to swallow. Their reliance on canned crushed pineapple is the tell of the period. Hawaiian canneries had made pineapple a year-round pantry staple by the 1920s, and cookbook writers used it freely in gelatines, ices and salads where fresh fruit would once have been impossible. The egg white lightens the ice so it holds a spoon-shaped ball rather than freezing to a solid block. Rolling a scoop of frozen dessert in shredded coconut to imitate a snowball was a familiar garnish trick, applied to ice cream and cake alike.