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New Providence Pineapple Custard
1 quart of cream. 1/2 pound of sugar, 2 ounces of corn starch. 10 yolks of eggs. 3/4 pound of pineapple. A small cup of milk to mix the starch. A pinch of salt.
Cut the pineapple in small dice, and if not quite ripe and sweet stew it in some syrup formed by covering it with white sugar.
Boil the cream with the half pound of sugar in it. Mix the starch with the cup of milk; pour the boiling cream to that, causing it to thicken without being quite cooked; beat the yolks and stir in, and then the pineapple. Bake.
A baked pineapple custard thickened with both starch and yolks, written for a cook who already knows what a custard should look like. Two things are left unsaid: the oven temperature and the problem with raw pineapple.
- Cook the pineapple, alwaysCook the pineapple -- Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that digests protein and can thin or weep a custard; a few minutes at a simmer destroys it. The recipe treats stewing in syrup as optional for underripe fruit; stewing in any case is the safer course, though the baking itself will also inactivate the enzyme. Canned pineapple has already been heat-treated and needs nothing beyond draining well.
- Weights to volumes1/2 lb sugar is a generous cup; 2 oz cornstarch is about 1/2 cup, which is a great deal of starch for a quart of cream and gives a firm, sliceable custard rather than a loose one. 3/4 lb pineapple is roughly 2 cups of small dice.
- "A small cup of milk"Read this as about 1/2 cup, enough to make a smooth slurry with the starch. It is a slurry, not a measured part of the liquid, so a little more or less does no harm.
- "Bake" means a water bath"Bake" -- No temperature is given. A water bath is the safer course: a moderate oven, around 325F, with the dish set in a pan of hot water reaching halfway up, until the centre is just set with a slight wobble, roughly 40 to 55 minutes for a single large dish.
- Tempering the yolksThe cream is boiled and the starch mixture is deliberately left "without being quite cooked." Let that base drop below a simmer before the beaten yolks go in, or they will scramble in streaks. Stir them in off the heat, then fold in the drained pineapple last.
- Drain the fruitSyrup carried over from stewing loosens the custard and pools at the bottom. Lift the dice out of the syrup and let them drain before they go into the base.
- YieldA quart of cream plus ten yolks fills a 2-quart dish or about ten individual cups, and serves eight to ten. It is rich enough that small portions are the point.
New Providence is the Bahamian island on which Nassau sits, and through the second half of the nineteenth century the Bahamas were a serious pineapple exporter, shipping fruit north to Baltimore, New York and Boston by schooner and later by steamer; Eleuthera pines were genuinely well known. Naming a custard after the island may have been a way of saying the fruit was the imported, properly ripened article rather than something hard and green, though that is a guess rather than anything the recipe itself tells us.