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Pineapple Sponge
Heat one pint of grated pineapple over hot water, sprinkle into it one-third a cup of fine tapioca (a quick-cooking kind), mixed with two-thirds a cup of sugar, and half a teaspoonful of salt; when the
The text breaks off mid-instruction, so what survives is the base of the dish rather than the whole of it. What follows covers the measurements and technique that are here, and what the finished sponge was meant to become.
- The recipe is incompleteThe passage stops at "when the." The missing words are likely something on the order of "when the tapioca is clear," and dishes of this name usually ended with beaten egg whites folded in, but both are conjecture: nothing in the surviving text says so. Treat this as a fragment and work from a complete quick-tapioca recipe if you want a guaranteed result.
- Pint of grated pineappleA pint is 2 cups, and "grated" means fruit rasped to a pulp with its juice, not neat chunks. Crushed pineapple in juice is the nearest tinned equivalent; a whole medium pineapple grated on the coarse side of a box grater gives roughly this volume.
- Over hot waterThis is a double boiler, or in the chafing dish the hot-water pan under the blazer. It matters here: tapioca and fruit sugar scorch readily over direct flame, and the gentle heat is what keeps the pulp from catching.
- "Fine tapioca (a quick-cooking kind)"This is what is now sold as instant or minute tapioca, not pearl. If you only have small pearl tapioca, it needs a long soak and much more liquid, and cannot be substituted spoon for spoon.
- Sugar mixed with the tapiocaNot fussiness — sugar and salt tossed through the dry granules keep them from clumping into lumps when they hit the hot pulp. Sprinkle the mixture in gradually while stirring.
- Cooking time and donenessQuick tapioca clears in about 5 to 10 minutes over hot water, stirred often. Go by appearance: the granules should be translucent with no white centres. Overcooked, the mixture turns to glue as it cools.
- If you finish it with beaten egg whitesFold the whites into the mixture while it is still hot so they are partly set by the residual heat, and use pasteurized whites if the dish will be served cold without further cooking.
- Yield and servingAbout four to six servings on the volume of fruit and tapioca given. Sponges of this kind were commonly turned into a mould or individual glasses and chilled, sometimes with cream or a thin custard sauce, but the text breaks off before any serving direction, so this is inference.
Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties came out of the chafing-dish craze of the 1890s, when a spirit lamp and a blazer pan let hostesses cook at the table in a parlour or a boarding-house room without a kitchen — which is why so many of the recipes in this section are things that can be stirred in one pan over hot water. A "sponge" in nineteenth-century American dessert usage meant any light mixture set with gelatin, cornstarch or tapioca and lifted with beaten egg whites; tapioca sponges were the cheap, reliable end of that family. Pineapple appears here as a luxury fruit that tinned and grated forms would, in the following decade, turn into something a cook could keep on a shelf: large-scale Hawaiian canned pineapple became widely available in the United States only in the 1900s, somewhat after this book. Worth noting that fresh pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that digests gelatin and prevents it setting — though whether period cooks reached for tapioca with that in mind cannot be documented.