Home › Orange and Pineapple › Louisiana Pineapple
Louisiana Pineapple
Chop one pineapple very fine, add the juice of one lemon, and strain through a fine sieve. Mix with one quart of milk and two tablespoonfuls of sugar. Serve with cracked ice.
A pineapple milk cooler from a book of temperance drinks. It works, but only if you understand what pineapple juice does to milk and act quickly.
- The hinge: mix at the last momentFresh pineapple contains bromelain, and the lemon juice drops the pH further; both will curdle milk within minutes. Combine the strained juice with cold milk, stir, and pour over ice immediately rather than letting it stand.
- If you want it to holdCanned or bottled pineapple juice has been heat-treated, which inactivates the bromelain, so it holds up better in milk. The acidity is unchanged, so it can still curdle, only more slowly. It costs you some of the fresh fruit's perfume.
- Chop and strain"Chop very fine" means what a blender or food processor now does in seconds. Push the pulp through a fine sieve and press hard; one medium pineapple yields roughly 1 to 2 cups of juice, depending on the fruit and how hard you press.
- MilkA quart is 4 cups. Whole milk gives the body the recipe assumes; skim tastes thin and separates more visibly.
- SugarTwo tablespoons for a quart is barely sweet by modern taste, and it depends entirely on the fruit. Dissolve the sugar in the pineapple juice before adding the milk, or use simple syrup, since granulated sugar dissolves only slowly in a cold drink.
- Cracked iceIce broken small, not cubes: wrap cubes in a towel and hit them with a rolling pin, or pulse briefly in a blender. It chills fast and dilutes as it goes, which is part of the intended effect.
- YieldAbout 5 to 6 cups before ice, or four to five generous glasses.
On Uncle Sam's Water Wagon belongs to the wave of non-alcoholic drink books published as national Prohibition approached, when hostesses and soda fountains alike needed a repertoire that did not depend on spirits. Milk-and-fruit coolers like this one filled the gap between lemonade and an ice cream soda, and pineapple was a natural choice: by the 1910s Hawaiian canneries had made it cheap and familiar across the United States, while fresh fruit reached northern cities by rail. The "Louisiana" in the title appears to be decorative rather than geographic; there is no particular Louisiana tradition behind pineapple in milk. The recipe is also an unintentional record of pre-refrigeration habits, since it assumes the cook has a block of ice to crack and a pantry of milk that must be used the day it arrives.<br><br>The enzyme bromelain, which curdles milk, was not isolated and named until the 1890s, and its behaviour was not common kitchen knowledge for decades after.