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Pirettes
4 slices canned pineapple 2 tablespoons grated cheese 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 teaspoon pepper 1 teaspoon sugar 2 teaspoons buttered crumbs 1 egg white, stiffly beaten Shred the pine apple and drain well. Add cheese, seasonings, sugar, bread crumbs and fold into the stiffly beaten egg white. Heap on crackers or bread, cut in fancy shapes, and brown in moderate oven. Serve immediately. Serves 6 to 8.
A hot canapé built on the same principle as a cheese soufflé: beaten egg white gives lift, and it holds only for a few minutes. Everything should be assembled while the oven is already hot.
- Drain much harder than you thinkCanned pineapple carries a great deal of syrup, and shredded fruit holds it in the fibres. Press the shreds in a sieve or wring them in a clean towel until they are barely damp, or the mixture will weep and soak the base.
- Moderate oven350F. If the bases are already dry and toasted, 375F browns the tops faster and gives the egg white less time to slump.
- Buttered crumbsDry breadcrumbs tossed in melted butter until they are evenly coated, roughly a teaspoon of butter to two of crumbs. They are there to absorb residual moisture and to brown; plain crumbs will not colour the same way.
- The cheese"Grated cheese" here almost certainly means a hard dry cheese rather than a soft one. Parmesan or a well-aged cheddar works; fresh mozzarella or anything soft will release water and defeat the draining.
- PepperHalf a teaspoon of pepper against two tablespoons of cheese and four pineapple slices is assertive by current taste. A quarter teaspoon is closer to what most palates now expect; the teaspoon of sugar will offset some of the heat.
- Fold, do not stirCombine the pineapple, cheese, seasonings and crumbs first, then fold that mixture into the whites in two or three additions with a spatula. Overworking knocks the air out and the topping bakes flat and rubbery.
- Toast the baseCrackers are fine as they are; bread cut in rounds, diamonds or crescents should be dried or lightly toasted on both sides before being heaped, otherwise it goes limp under the topping.
- Yield and timingServes 6 to 8 as an appetiser, so perhaps a couple of small canapes a head from a mixture this size. The recipe gives no time: watch them and pull them as soon as the tops colour, then carry them straight to the table -- the puff falls within a few minutes of leaving the heat.
Pirettes belong to the vogue for the hot canape -- small savouries baked to order and passed with cocktails -- that grew as the cocktail party took hold in American entertaining. The name looks like a coinage of the sort these books produced freely: pineapple plus a French-sounding ending, though nothing here confirms that reading. Canned pineapple made the dish possible at all, and Hawaiian pack was cheap and widely available in the interwar decades, which may be why sweet-and-savoury pairings of pineapple with cheese, ham and cream cheese recur in entertaining chapters of the period. The beaten egg white, heaped and browned, is a device that period cookery writing applied to a great many savouries.