Home › Canning and Preserving › Preserved Pineapple
Preserved Pineapple
1 pineapple 1 cup water 3/4 weight in sugar Peel the pineapple and put it through the meat chopper. Weigh the fruit and add three fourths of the weight in sugar. Bring slowly to a boil and simmer for about twenty minutes, or until the consistency of marmalade.
A two-line preserve of the kind written for cooks who already knew what jam should look like. The proportions are given by weight of the prepared fruit, so a kitchen scale does most of the work.
- The hinge: cook to a set, not to a clockPineapple carries very little pectin, so twenty minutes is a guide rather than a target. Take it to about 220F on a thermometer, or until a spoonful chilled on a cold plate mounds and wrinkles instead of running.
- The stray cup of waterThe heading lists 1 cup water but the method never uses it. It is almost certainly meant to go in at the start so the fruit does not scorch before its own juice runs; with a very juicy pineapple you may want less.
- "Put it through the meat chopper"A hand-cranked grinder with a coarse plate. A food processor pulsed a few times gives the same shreddy texture; do not puree it or you lose the marmalade character.
- Sugar ratioSugar at three-quarters the weight of the prepared fruit is high by modern taste, but it is what makes the preserve keep. Dropping below roughly half the fruit weight gives a looser, more perishable product that needs refrigeration.
- TrimmingThe recipe says only to peel. Cut out the fibrous core and any woody eyes near the rind, or they stay tough through the whole cooking.
- Fresh fruit only, in practiceCanned pineapple is packed in syrup or juice and already softened; it will thin the preserve and taste flat. If it is all you have, drain hard and expect a shorter cook.
- Yield and keepingYield depends on how far you reduce it; a medium pineapple, roughly 2 lb prepared, plus its sugar makes several half-pint jars. This period recipe stops at the pan; by current guidance, fill hot jars and process in a boiling-water bath, or simply refrigerate and use within a month.
- ScorchingSugar this concentrated catches easily near the end. Use a wide heavy pan, stir across the bottom, and pull it off the moment the sheeting test passes.
Pineapple appears with real confidence in American cookbooks of the early twentieth century because it had stopped being a luxury: commercial plantations and canneries in Hawaii expanded rapidly after 1900, and the canned fruit became widely available. That shift shows in the recipe's tone, which assumes the cook can get a pineapple whenever the mood strikes and does not bother to call it a treat. The instruction to use the meat chopper is equally of its moment: the clamp-on hand grinder was standard equipment, pressed into service for nuts, dried fruit, cooked leftovers and, here, tough fresh fruit that would otherwise need long knife work.