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Frozen Pineapple
Two pineapples grated, 2 quarts of water, 2 pounds of sugar, beaten whites of 2 eggs. Freeze same as ice cream.
A fountain-style water ice: fruit, sugar syrup and beaten whites, churned in a hand-crank freezer packed with ice and rock salt. The proportions work out to a light sorbet rather than a dense sherbet.
- The hinge: when the whites go inThe recipe lists the beaten whites with the other ingredients and does not say when to add them. One common approach is to fold them in once the mixture has frozen to a slush and churn them in to lighten it; added at the start they tend to deflate.
- Raw whitesNothing here is ever heated, so the whites stay raw. Use pasteurized whites in a carton if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immune-compromised. The whites can also be left out entirely, giving a denser but perfectly good ice.
- Two pineapplesPeel, remove the fibrous core, and grate on the coarse side of a box grater or pulse briefly in a processor; the recipe wants shreds and juice, not puree.
- Sugar and freezingTwo pounds is about 4 1/2 cups. Dissolve it fully in the water before adding the fruit — undissolved sugar sinks and freezes into gritty pockets. This sugar level is what keeps the ice scoopable; cutting it much will give you a solid block.
- "Freeze same as ice cream"This meant a churn freezer, canister packed in crushed ice and rock salt at roughly three parts ice to one part salt, cranked until stiff. A modern ice cream maker does the same job; a shallow pan in the freezer works if you break up the crystals with a fork every 30 minutes.
- Canned pineappleFresh is closer to the original, but about 40 oz of crushed pineapple will substitute. If it is packed in syrup, drain it and cut the sugar back accordingly.
- YieldA large batch. Halve it for a domestic freezer.
- ServingIt softens quickly, so keep it in the coldest part of the freezer and let it sit only a minute or two before scooping.
Soda-fountain manuals of the 1890s and 1900s treated frozen fruit ices as fountain stock rather than dessert cookery — made in quantity, held in an ice-packed tub, and sold by the glass alongside phosphates and egg drinks. Pineapple was a fashionable fountain fruit of the period: steamship and rail traffic from the Caribbean, and later Hawaiian production, brought the fruit within reach of a shopkeeper, and canned pineapple reached American groceries in the same decades. Beaten white was often used in place of cream, giving body and a paler, softer texture without the cost or the keeping problems of dairy — the same ingredient that appears in the era's egg phosphates and lemonades "with the white of one egg."