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Pineapple Sweet Salad
1 pineapple. 1 teacupful of powdered sugar 1/2 cup of maraschino. Peel a pineapple, cut it into uniform slices and cover them with the sugar in a glass dish. Let it remain to form a syrup, and when to be served add the maraschino.
A macerated pineapple dessert with three ingredients, which means the quality of the fruit and the identity of the maraschino are the whole dish.
- Maraschino means the liqueurThis is Maraschino, the clear dry cherry-kernel liqueur from Zadar (Luxardo is the standard bottling), not the pink syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. The modern substitute changes the dish entirely; kirsch is a closer stand-in than cherry syrup.
- A teacupfulNot a standardised measure; period sources reckon it anywhere from about 1/2 to a full cup. Start with 1/2 cup of powdered sugar for one pineapple and add more only if the fruit is sharp.
- Powdered sugarThen as now, sugar ground fine. Modern confectioners' sugar contains cornstarch, which can leave a slight cloudiness in the syrup; superfine or caster sugar dissolves cleaner and is the better choice here.
- Cutting the fruitPeel deeply enough to remove the eyes, slice into rounds about 1/4 inch thick, and punch out the fibrous core with a small cutter. The core will not soften in syrup and is unpleasant to chew.
- How long to macerateThe recipe says only 'let it remain to form a syrup'; an hour or two, chilled, is a reasonable modern reading. The sugar draws juice out of the fruit and that juice is the syrup; there is nothing else in the dish.
- Add the liqueur at the last minuteThis is the hinge. Poured in early, the alcohol firms the fruit slightly and the aroma flattens. Spoon it over as the dish goes to the table, about 1/4 to 1/2 cup for one pineapple.
- ServingOne pineapple gives four to six portions. Serve cold in a shallow glass dish with the syrup spooned over. Do not pair it with a cream or gelatin garnish set with gelatin alone, since raw pineapple's bromelain will slacken it.
"Sweet salad" in American cookbooks of this period meant a fruit salad served as dessert, distinguished from the savory salads of the earlier course, and pineapple was its prestige ingredient: by the 1890s steam shipping and Florida and Cuban plantings had brought fresh pineapple within reach of city hotels and confectioners. Maraschino, distilled from Marasca cherries and their crushed stones in Dalmatia, had been a luxury import to England and America since the early nineteenth century and appears constantly in Victorian and Edwardian pastry work, in trifles, ices and fruit compotes, where its faint almond bitterness offsets sugar. A dish of this kind hid nothing, being no more than good fruit, sugar and an expensive bottle.