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Crushed Pineapple
Select pineapple, fully ripe, 1 pound; powdered sugar, 1 pound. Pare the fruit and slice it crosswise one-quarter inch thick. Cut the slices in cubes, avoiding the core. Put these in a glass bowl, add the sugar and stir well together. Use with ice cream soda.
A fountain preparation rather than a dessert: equal weights of fruit and sugar left to macerate into a thick, syrupy crush that gets spooned over ice cream and shot with soda water. Two things decide whether it works — ripeness and patience.
- The hinge is ripenessUnderripe pineapple will not release its juice into the sugar and stays fibrous and sharp. Look for fruit that smells sweet at the base and gives slightly under the thumb; a pale, hard, unscented pineapple will never come right, since pineapple does not ripen further after cutting.
- Equal weights, by weightOne pound of prepared fruit to one pound of sugar is a 1:1 ratio by weight, not volume — roughly 2 1/4 cups of granulated sugar. The high proportion is deliberate: the sugar draws out juice by osmosis and forms the syrup that makes the crush pourable.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage "powdered sugar" meant finely ground granulated sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold today. Use superfine (caster) sugar, or ordinary granulated, which dissolves perfectly well over an hour of standing.
- A pound of trimmed fruitThe pound is the pared, cored, cubed weight. A pineapple loses roughly half its weight to skin, crown and core, so a fruit of about 3 lb will give you the pound you need.
- Avoid the core, and mean itThe core is woody and stays woody no matter how long it sits in sugar. Quarter each slice around it rather than trying to trim it out afterward.
- Let it standThe recipe says only to stir, but the mixture needs an hour or two at room temperature, stirred once or twice, before the sugar has dissolved and the syrup formed. Crushing lightly with a potato masher, or a brief pulse in a food processor, gives the coarse texture the name implies.
- KeepingRefrigerated in a covered jar it holds about a week; the sugar is preservative, but the fruit goes on softening in the syrup until it turns mushy.
- Yield and useFigure two generous tablespoons per glass — spoon it over a scoop of vanilla ice cream, add a splash of the syrup, and fill with cold carbonated water, pouring down the side so it does not foam over.
- If you use cannedCanned crushed pineapple is already packed in syrup and needs no added sugar at all; treating it with a further pound will produce something cloying. This recipe is built for raw fruit.
Soda fountain manuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were trade books, written for the dispenser behind the marble counter rather than the home cook, and they are full of these plain "crushed fruit" preparations — pineapple, strawberry, raspberry, cherry — kept in covered glass jars along the back bar and ladled into glasses all day. Fresh pineapple reached mainland cities by steamer from the Caribbean; Hawaii's expansion at the end of the century went largely into canned fruit rather than fresh, so how much either supply did to make pineapple a fountain staple is not something this recipe can tell us. Earlier in the century it had been an expensive luxury. The glass bowl is sensible in any case: pineapple is acidic enough to pick up a taste from tin or copper.