Home › At the Fountain › Creamed Pineapple
Creamed Pineapple
One and one-half ounces crushed pineapple, 2 ounces cream, ¼ ounce shaved ice. Shake, strain, toss and serve.
A fountain formula rather than a kitchen recipe: four ounces of finished drink, built in a shaker and served in a small glass. The measurements are fluid ounces throughout.
- Use cooked or canned pineapple, not freshFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which breaks down milk proteins; it will thin the cream, give it a curdled look and turn it bitter within minutes. Canned crushed pineapple is heated during packing, which destroys the enzyme. This is the hinge of the drink.
- What "crushed pineapple" meantAt the fountain this would have been a jar of crushed fruit packed in syrup rather than fresh fruit. Canned crushed pineapple in syrup, not juice, is the nearest equivalent; the syrup is the only sweetener in the formula.
- CreamFountain cream was generally nearer today's light cream or half-and-half than heavy whipping cream. Heavy cream will work but gives a heavier, almost dessert-like drink.
- The ice quantity is deliberateA quarter ounce of shaved ice is about half a tablespoon. It is there to chill and aerate during the shake, not to dilute; the mixture is strained off it immediately.
- "Toss"Most likely pouring the strained drink back and forth between two vessels, which aerates the cream and gives a light foam on top. Two or three passes is plenty.
- Yield and glassAbout three and a half fluid ounces once strained -- a single small tumbler or a 6-ounce fountain glass. It is meant to be drunk at once, before the cream and fruit separate.
- Scaling upThe proportions are 3 parts fruit to 4 parts cream. Multiply as needed, but shake in batches no larger than a cocktail shaker will chill properly.
Creamed drinks -- fruit shaken with sweet cream and strained -- sat between the plain fruit phosphate and the full ice cream soda, and were pitched as nourishing as much as refreshing. Pineapple appears constantly in these books because canned Hawaiian pineapple had become cheap and reliably available in the first decades of the century, and crushed fruit in heavy syrup kept well in an open jar on a busy counter. American drugstores had been selling soda water since the early nineteenth century, and the trade is generally said to have grown through Prohibition, when some bars converted to soda service.