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Pineapple Ice Cream
3 pints thin cream 1/2 cup sugar 1 pint can grated pineapple Add the pineapple to the cream and sugar; let stand for one hour and freeze.
A four-ingredient custard-free ice cream that depends entirely on the quality of the cream and the churn. A few of its assumptions no longer hold.
- "Thin cream"This means light or coffee cream, roughly 18-20 percent butterfat, not the 36 percent heavy cream sold today. Using all heavy cream gives a heavy, greasy result; a mix of about two parts half-and-half to one part heavy cream is closer to the intent.
- QuantityThree pints is six cups, and with a pint of pineapple the batch runs close to two quarts of finished ice cream. Most domestic machines take one to one and a half quarts of base at a time, so plan on halving it or churning in two goes.
- The sugar looks lowHalf a cup for six cups of cream is very little by modern standards, but canned pineapple of the period was usually packed in heavy syrup, which would have added sweetness the recipe does not account for separately. Pineapple canned in juice will give a leaner, icier result.
- Canned, not freshFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which turns dairy bitter and thin on standing. Canning heats the fruit and destroys the enzyme, which is why the hour of maceration is safe here and would not be with fresh fruit.
- The standing hourThe recipe does not say why, but the time lets the sugar dissolve fully; chill the mixture thoroughly during it, since a cold base churns faster and freezes smoother.
- "Freeze"This meant a hand-crank freezer packed with rock salt and crushed ice and cranked for twenty to thirty minutes; period sources give ratios anywhere from about one part salt to three parts ice up to one to eight. An electric machine does the same work; churn until it holds a soft ribbon, then harden in the freezer two to four hours.
- TextureWith no eggs, no gelatin and little sugar, this sets hard and icy after a day. It is best eaten the day it is made, and worth letting it temper five to ten minutes on the counter before serving.
- YieldAbout two quarts, or twelve to sixteen servings.
Pineapple ice cream belonged to the small group of fruit ices that home cooks could make reliably once canned fruit became cheap and dependable. Fresh pineapple reached most American tables rarely and expensively, but by the 1910s canned grated pineapple, much of it from Hawaii, was widely available, and cookbooks of the period lean on it hard for salads, fillings and frozen desserts. The recipe's brevity is telling: it assumes the reader owns an ice-cream freezer, knows the salt-to-ice ratio without being told, and can judge when the dasher grows stiff. Whatever the actual spread of such equipment, the instruction "and freeze" evidently needed no elaboration for the book's intended reader.