Home › Syrups › Thrift Pineapple Syrup
Thrift Pineapple Syrup
When making jams or preserves save the parings and cores of pineapples. Wash well and chop fine, and use one whole pineapple as well. Cover with cold water and boil slowly for one hour. Strain through a jelly bag, and to each pint of juice add three quarters of a pound of sugar. Boil for ten minutes, skimming until perfectly clear. Fill hot sterilized jars to over-flowing and seal.
A wartime-thrift syrup that turns pineapple trimmings into a soda-fountain base. Everything about it works except the sealing method, which has been superseded.
- The sealing step is obsoleteFilling hot jars and sealing without further processing (open-kettle canning) is no longer considered sound, even for an acidic, high-sugar syrup; mold and yeast spoilage are the usual outcomes. Treat the finished syrup as refrigerator or freezer stock, or process it by a current boiling-water-bath schedule for fruit syrups.
- Start with clean paringsSkins carry field yeasts and mold, and pineapple ferments readily in warm weather. Scrub the fruit before peeling, use the trimmings the same day, and discard anything soft, bruised or showing white bloom rather than boiling it in.
- Sugar by weightThree quarters of a pound of granulated sugar is about 1 2/3 cups. Weighing is worth it here, since the sugar ratio is what keeps the syrup from spoiling quickly once opened.
- A pint is 16 fluid ouncesMeasure the strained juice before sweetening, not the raw pulp and water. The recipe does not say how many pineapples' worth of trimmings to collect, so the finished yield depends entirely on how much you have saved.
- The jelly bagA double layer of damp cheesecloth in a sieve, or a nylon jelly bag, does the same job. Let it drip; squeezing forces through fine pulp that clouds the syrup and makes the ten-minute skimming pointless.
- Skim, do not raceThe foam that rises in the first minutes carries protein and fine solids. Take it off with a metal spoon as it forms; a syrup skimmed properly stays bright, and one boiled hard and unskimmed sets cloudy and tastes cooked.
- Watch the long boilOne hour of slow simmering is for extracting flavour from tough cores, not for reduction. Keep the water barely moving and top up if the trimmings emerge above the surface, or the pot will scorch and the syrup will taste caramelised.
- How it was usedServing -- The recipe gives no serving directions. Two or three tablespoons in a tall glass topped with cold soda water, or over shaved ice, suits a syrup of this kind; it also takes well to iced tea or brushing on a plain cake layer.