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Pineapple Pie (Two eggs cups sugar tbsp flour)
Two eggs, 1½ cups sugar, 2 tbsp. flour, butter size of an egg, 1 can grated pineapple. Cook all together until thick as cream; bake with one crust, with beaten whites on top. Put in oven and brown.
— Mrs. Robert J. Northridge
A stovetop-cooked pineapple custard poured into a baked shell and finished with meringue. The vagueness sits in two places: how much butter, and which parts of the eggs go where.
- The egg problemTwo eggs are called for in the filling, then "beaten whites on top" for the meringue. Almost certainly the yolks thicken the filling and the whites are reserved for the meringue; if you use whole eggs in the filling you will have no meringue. Separate the two eggs and use the yolks below, the whites above.
- Butter size of an eggA standard shorthand for about 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. It is stirred in for richness and gloss, not structure, so a little either way does no harm.
- One can grated pineapplePeriod cans of pineapple commonly ran between a pound and 20 ounces, though sizes varied. Crushed pineapple in juice is the closest modern equivalent; the juice is the liquid that makes the custard, so keep it. Raw pineapple's bromelain attacks egg protein, so fresh fruit should be cooked before or with the filling; heating the mixture destroys the enzyme.
- Cooking the fillingWhisk sugar, flour and yolks together first, then add pineapple and butter, and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until it thickens and the flour loses its raw taste. "Thick as cream" undersells it; take it to the consistency of a loose pudding that mounds on the spoon, or the pie will not slice.
- Bake with one crust'One crust' means a single-crust pie. Because the filling is already cooked, a blind-baked shell gives the crispest result: a 9-inch shell at 425F for 15 to 18 minutes, weighted, then cooled. The original may equally have been assembled in a raw shell and baked through; the recipe gives no temperature or timing.
- Meringue and browningBeat the two whites to soft peaks with about 4 tablespoons sugar, spread to the crust edge to seal, and brown at 350F for 12 to 15 minutes. The bare instruction "put in oven and brown" at a high temperature colors the peaks before the meringue sets underneath.
- SugarA cup and a half against 20 ounces of already-sweet canned fruit is very sweet by current taste. A cup carries the pie perfectly well, and the flour still thickens.
- YieldOne 9-inch pie, eight slices. Cool at least two hours before cutting; serve the same day, as meringue weeps in the refrigerator.
Church and lodge cookbooks of the early twentieth century, of which the Philathea book is one, are the clearest record of what canned goods did to American home baking. Grated or crushed pineapple in tins came out of Hawaii's commercial canneries in the years after 1900 and put a tropical fruit within reach of cooks who had never seen a whole one, at a price and a convenience that fresh fruit could not touch. The result was a wave of pineapple pies, puddings and salads built on the pattern already used for lemon pie: a cooked flour-and-egg custard in a blind-baked shell, crowned with meringue made from the leftover whites. Nothing is wasted, and the contributor's name attached to it is the whole point of a subscription cookbook of this kind.