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Pineapple and Cocoanut Cream
1 grated cocoanut and milk. 1 cup sugar. 1 quart cream. 1 can pineapple cut fine.
Put cocoanut milk and juice of pineapple on fire with cup sugar and let dissolve. When cool add cream. When partly frozen add pineapple and cocoanut.
A late-1910s ice cream built for a hand-crank freezer: a sweetened liquid base, chilled, churned, then loaded with fruit and coconut near the end. Two details carry the whole thing — the canned pineapple is not laziness, and the fruit must go in late.
- Use canned pineapple, not freshFresh pineapple contains bromelain, a protease that attacks dairy proteins and can leave a cream base thin and faintly bitter. Canning heat-kills the enzyme, so the can the recipe calls for happens to sidestep the problem, whatever the author's reason for choosing it. If you must use fresh, simmer it first and cool it.
- "Cocoanut milk and milk""1 grated cocoanut and milk" -- This most likely means a whole fresh coconut: the thin water drained from the shell plus the grated white meat. Canned coconut milk is a different, much fatter product; if you substitute, use about 1 cup and expect a richer, denser result. Unsweetened frozen grated coconut is the closest stand-in for the meat.
- Quart of creamFour cups. Market cream of the period was generally thinner than today's heavy cream, closer to what we would call light cream. A 50/50 mix of heavy cream and whole milk is a reasonable stand-in; all heavy cream gives a heavier, more buttery freeze.
- Dissolve, do not boilThe coconut water, pineapple juice and sugar go on the heat only until the sugar is gone — a minute or two of gentle warming. Boiling drives off the coconut's aroma and can scorch the sugar against the pan.
- Cool completely before the cream goes in"When cool" should mean refrigerator-cold, not merely off the boil. A warm base added to cream shortens the churn and produces larger ice crystals.
- FreezingAn ice cream machine handles this directly: churn 20-30 minutes, then add the drained pineapple and coconut in the last few minutes so they distribute without being pulverised. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and beat hard every 30 minutes, folding the fruit in once the mixture is slushy.
- The sugar is on the low sideOne cup for a quart of cream gives a fairly lean, icy set by modern standards, though the pineapple juice going into the base adds some sweetness of its own. Expect to let it stand 10-15 minutes out of the freezer before scooping, or raise the sugar to about 1 1/4 cups for a softer texture.
- YieldProbably around two quarts, serving eight to ten. Drain the pineapple pieces before folding them in, reserving the syrup for the base as the recipe directs; excess syrup added at the end will make the finished cream sludgy.
Mrs. Wilson's frozen desserts belong to the moment when ice cream was passing from a luxury churned by hand in a bucket of ice and rock salt to something an ordinary household made in quantity. Pineapple and coconut both arrived in American kitchens through the same channel — steam shipping and, in the years after Hawaii's annexation in 1898, the commercial canneries that followed there from about 1901 — and the pairing turns up in early twentieth-century cookbooks as a "tropical" flavour that could be assembled largely from the pantry, since the pineapple came out of a tin and the coconut kept for weeks in its shell. Grating a whole coconut by hand was tedious enough that the recipe's brevity is slightly misleading; commercial shredded coconut, sweetened and dried, was already on sale and available as a shortcut.