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Pineapple Conserve
1 can of pineapple. 8 ounces of sugar. 1 ounce of butter. 2 eggs. Reduce the fruit to a pulp by mashing in a bright saucepan; add to it half the juice from the can and the sugar and butter. Boil; add the eggs, and stir over the fire a few minutes, till thick.
One pound of grated, fresh pineapple and a half cup of water answers the same as the canned. Simmer with the sugar till cooked and transparent-cooking, then finish like the other.
This is a pineapple curd in all but name, thickened with whole eggs rather than set with pectin. The whole thing hinges on the eggs: they go in off a hard boil and never see one again.
- Eggs must not boilOnce the eggs go in, keep the mixture below a simmer and stir constantly; around 170-180F it will thicken to a coating consistency. A true boil scrambles the egg and the conserve turns grainy. Straining through a sieve at the end covers minor sins.
- A bright saucepanProbably means a well-scoured pan with a clean, bright interior; the recipe does not say why. In practice use stainless steel or another nonreactive pan: bare copper and pineapple acid are a poor combination.
- The canThe recipe gives no tin size. Sliced or crushed pineapple is sold today in roughly 20 oz tins; period tin sizes varied. Crushed pineapple in juice saves the mashing step entirely.
- Sugar8 ounces is weight, not volume: about 1 1/8 cups granulated. Canned pineapple in heavy syrup is already sweet, so taste before committing to all of it.
- Fresh pineapple and bromelainThe fresh-fruit version tells you to simmer the pulp with the sugar until transparent before the eggs go in, and that order matters. Raw pineapple contains bromelain, which digests egg protein and will keep the mixture thin; cooking the fruit first destroys it.
- Cook until transparentFor the fresh version this is the doneness cue rather than a time; the recipe gives no timing, and a pound of grated fruit will need a fair stretch of gentle simmering before the flesh loses its opacity.
- Butter1 ounce is 2 tablespoons. Stir it in at the end off the heat if you want a glossier finish than boiling it with the fruit gives.
- Yield and keepingThe stated quantities make considerably more than 1 1/2 cups. Despite the name it is not a preserve: egg-thickened, it belongs in the refrigerator and should be used within about a week.
"Conserve" is a looser word in bakeshop usage than in a preserving book; it covers a thick sweetened fruit paste kept on hand to fill tarts, turnovers and layer cakes, and this one is in effect a fruit curd of the lemon-curd family, using pineapple in place of citrus. The recipe's easy assumption that a can of pineapple is the default, with fresh fruit offered as the substitute, suggests a date after commercial canning had made a fruit that spoils within days of cutting widely available out of season. The double instruction, canned first and fresh second, is a small record of that shift.