Honolulu Tea
Make a syrup of one half cup of juice from preserved pineapple to two tablespoonfuls of sugar, and simmer cubes of pineapple in it until the syrup is nearly absorbed by fruit. Serve three cubes to each cup of hot tea, and more sugar if desired.
A sweetened-fruit garnish for hot tea rather than a brewed blend. The whole point is the candied pineapple cubes at the bottom of the cup, so the syrup reduction is where the attention goes.
- The hinge: reduce, don't boil dry"Until the syrup is nearly absorbed" means a slow simmer until the liquid is thick and clinging and the cubes look glossy; how long that takes depends on how much fruit is in the pan. Pineapple sugar scorches fast once the water is gone, and burnt caramel will carry straight into the tea.
- Preserved pineappleThis means pineapple put up in heavy syrup, whether canned, bottled or home-preserved. Canned pineapple in juice works but is far less sweet; taste the liquid before adding the two tablespoons of sugar and adjust down or up.
- CubesCut rings or chunks into pieces of about half an inch so three of them fit a teacup without crowding it. Fresh pineapple can be substituted, but it is more acidic and more fibrous and needs a longer simmer to soften.
- QuantitiesThe recipe fixes only the syrup and sugar, not the amount of fruit; half a cup of syrup with two tablespoons sugar will candy about a cupful of cubes, which at three cubes a cup would serve several people. The cubes keep in their syrup, covered, for several days in the refrigerator.
- The tea itselfUnspecified in the original, which most likely means a black tea, brewed hot and strong enough not to be flattened by the sugar. Ceylon or a plain English-breakfast style holds up best; delicate greens disappear under the pineapple.
- ServingPut the cubes in the cup first and pour the hot tea over them so the residual syrup dissolves. A spoon is useful, since the fruit is left in the cup to be eaten.
Recipes like this one circulated widely in the era when publishers scrambled to prove that a hostess could still put on a good table without spirits. Tea and fruit-syrup drinks carried much of that weight, and Hawaiian pineapple was an obvious prop: the territory's canneries had grown enormously in the early twentieth century, and pineapple in heavy syrup was by then a cheap, familiar, faintly exotic staple in mainland kitchens. The name is decorative rather than descriptive; there is no evidence of a Honolulu origin for the drink, and it belongs to a broad fashion of the era for giving simple recipes far-flung place names. What the method preserves is a genuinely sensible bit of thrift, using the syrup the preserved fruit is packed in rather than pouring it away.