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Pineapple Filling
1 pt. can pineapple. 1 cup sugar. 1/4 box gelatin.
Put on stove and boil until thick.
Four lines and no method to speak of, in the telegraphic style Mrs. Wilson used for cake fillings. The gelatin is the part that needs attention.
- What "1/4 box gelatin" meansGranulated gelatin was sold in boxes divided into pre-measured envelopes, though the weights varied by brand; a quarter box works out at roughly 1/4 to 1/2 oz (about 2 teaspoons to a tablespoon). That is enough to set about 2 cups of liquid to a soft, spreadable consistency.
- Soften it firstThe original assumes knowledge the reader had: granulated gelatin is sprinkled over a few tablespoons of cold liquid and left to swell for five minutes before it meets heat. Dropped dry into hot syrup it clumps and you get strings of undissolved gelatin through the filling.
- Do not actually boil it"Boil until thick" is the weak point of the instruction. Prolonged hard boiling breaks gelatin down and it loses setting power; the thickening you want comes from reducing the pineapple juice and sugar, then stirring the softened gelatin in off the heat. Reduce the fruit and sugar for a few minutes, pull the pan off, add the gelatin, stir until clear.
- A pint canTwo cups of canned pineapple with its syrup — crushed pineapple works best for a filling; sliced or chunk should be chopped small.
- Canned, not freshThis matters more than it looks. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatin and will leave the filling permanently liquid. Canned fruit has been heated enough to destroy the enzyme, so the substitution is not optional here.
- SweetnessA full cup of sugar against two cups of already-syruped fruit is very sweet by current taste. Halving it will not affect the set, since the gelatin does the work.
- Yield and useAbout 2 cups — enough between the layers of one 9-inch two-layer cake, or in tart shells. Cool it to room temperature and let it firm up before spreading; warm, it will run out at the sides.
Mrs. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Philadelphia Inquirer and made her name during the First World War teaching wheat, sugar and fat economy; her New Cook Book (1920) carries that plain, compressed style throughout — ingredients stacked in a column, method in one sentence. A filling like this one belongs to the moment when two industrial products became cheap enough for everyday home baking at once: canned Hawaiian pineapple, which moved from luxury to pantry staple in the first two decades of the century, and packaged granulated gelatin, which replaced the older labour of boiling calves' feet or shaving isinglass. Between them they made a fruit filling far less trouble to prepare, and cookbooks of the 1920s are full of the results.