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Bisque of Pineapple Ice Cream
1 can pineapple or 3/4 pound. 2 cups sugar. 4 cups cream. Chop the pineapple small and put it in a bright pan or kettle with the sugar and a few spoonfuls of juice or water to dissolve the sugar to syrup. Simmer at the side of the range a short time.
Whip the cream till it is half froth, then freeze it first by itself, because the pineapple added before freezing has a tendency to curdle it. Pound the pineapple and syrup through a colander, mix it with the partly frozen cream, and freeze again.
It can and ought to be managed to have the pineapple in syrup prepared beforehand to be cold. In making these bisques it is not best to pound the fruit perfectly fine, but the small pieces about like grains of wheat should be perceptible and show that the creams are mixed with fruits and not merely flavored.
A no-egg, no-custard ice cream in the old confectioner's sense: sweetened fruit folded into whipped cream and frozen. The instructions are sound, but a few of the terms and quantities need translating.
- The hinge: freeze the cream firstThe author is right that pineapple added to unfrozen cream tends to curdle it — the fruit's acidity is the likely culprit, with bromelain an added factor if the fruit is fresh. Get the cream to a soft, half-frozen state before the cold fruit syrup goes in, and fold rather than stir.
- Fresh pineapple must be cookedCanned pineapple is heat-treated, so its bromelain is already dead. Fresh pineapple contains active bromelain, which will thin and curdle dairy; the simmering step here inactivates it. Do not shortcut the cooking if you are using fresh fruit.
- "A bright pan"Untinned copper or bare aluminium reacts with acidic fruit, discolouring the syrup and giving a metallic edge. A stainless or enamelled pan is the modern equivalent of the confectioner's clean, bright kettle.
- "Simmer at the side of the range"On a coal range the side was the cool zone. Read this as the lowest simmer, five to ten minutes, just enough to dissolve the sugar and soften the fruit without cooking it to jam.
- QuantitiesOne can or 3/4 lb means roughly 12 oz of drained fruit; 4 cups cream is a quart of heavy cream. The 2 cups sugar is generous by current taste — around 1 1/2 cups still freezes properly and lets the pineapple through. Cutting sugar much further gives a harder, icier result, since sugar is what keeps the mixture scoopable.
- "Pound through a colander"This means press the fruit and syrup through with a spoon or pestle, not puree it. The author's point about pieces the size of wheat grains is the whole character of the dish; a blender destroys it.
- Everything coldThe fruit syrup must be thoroughly chilled, ideally overnight, before it meets the cream. Warm syrup melts the half-frozen base and invites curdling.
- FreezingIn a modern machine, churn the whipped cream until thick and soft, add the cold fruit, and churn briefly to combine, then harden in the freezer for two to three hours. Without a machine, freeze in a shallow pan and beat well twice during setting.
- YieldAbout two quarts — twelve to sixteen small servings, which is how a bisque this rich was meant to be served.
In late nineteenth-century American confectionery, bisque on an ice cream list had nothing to do with shellfish soup: it described a frozen cream carrying visible solid matter, whether crushed fruit, chopped nuts or pounded macaroons, as distinct from a plain flavoured cream. That is exactly the distinction the author insists on here − the fruit should "show that the creams are mixed with fruits and not merely flavored." Pineapple was newly practical for such work. Canned pineapple reached American kitchens in this period largely as Caribbean fruit packed by East Coast canneries from the 1860s and 1870s, giving pastry cooks a year-round supply of a fruit that had been a luxury centrepiece a generation earlier, and the recipe's casual "1 can pineapple" marks that shift. The warning about curdling is empirical rather than chemical: any confectioner who had ruined a batch of cream with fresh pineapple knew the rule, and cooking the fruit was the standing remedy.