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Pineapple Juice
1 pineapple cracked ice Peel a good ripe pineapple, cut into small pieces and put through fruit press or potato ricer until all juice is extracted. Strain and serve in glass with cracked ice.
A two-ingredient recipe whose success rests entirely on the fruit. Nothing here needs modernising except the equipment and your expectations about yield.
- Ripeness is the whole recipeWith no sugar and no dilution, an underripe pineapple gives juice that is thin, acidic and harsh. Choose fruit that smells sweet at the base and gives slightly to pressure; the eyes should be flat and golden rather than green.
- Fruit press or potato ricerA ricer works but is slow and messy with pineapple. A blender followed by straining through a fine sieve or a double layer of cheesecloth is far less effort, though the juice comes out cloudier than pressed juice. A centrifugal juicer is the quickest option.
- Cut out the coreThe recipe says only to peel, but the fibrous central core yields little juice and clogs a press or ricer. Quarter the fruit lengthwise and trim it away before pressing.
- YieldA medium pineapple of about 3 lb gives only a modest amount of strained juice — perhaps a cup or two depending on the method, enough for two small glasses. This is a costlier drink than it looks on the page.
- Serve it at onceFresh pineapple juice separates within minutes and its flavour flattens after an hour or two in the refrigerator. Press it when you intend to drink it.
- BromelainThe enzyme in raw pineapple breaks down protein, which is why it stings the mouth after several glasses and why raw juice will not set gelatine. It is harmless but noticeable if an invalid is drinking it repeatedly.
- Cracked iceIce wrapped in a clean towel and struck with a rolling pin gives the coarse shards intended here. Cubes will do, but they chill more slowly and dilute less, which changes the drink.
"Invalid cookery" was a standard department in American household manuals well into the 1920s, when the sick were nursed at home and diet was one of the few things a household could actually control. The recipes in these sections are deliberately plain, easily digested and quickly made at the bedside: beef tea, gruel, barley water, albumen drinks and fresh fruit juices. Pineapple was valued partly for palatability in a fevered mouth and partly on the strength of a long-standing belief in its digestive virtue, an idea that gained scientific footing after bromelain was identified in the fruit in the late nineteenth century. That a book of this period assumes a whole fresh pineapple is at hand says something about the era as well: by the 1910s Hawaiian plantations and the canning industry had turned an eighteenth-century luxury — one often said to have been rented by the day as a table centrepiece, though the story rests on thin evidence — into an ordinary grocery item, canned pineapple above all.