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Canned Pineapples
Remove skin and eyes from pineapples; then cut in halfinch slices, and slices in cubes, at the same time discarding the core. Follow Directions for Canning. Pineapples may be shredded and cooked in one-half their weight of sugar without water, and then put in jars. When put up in this way they are useful for the making of sherbets and fancy desserts.
Two methods in one short entry: plain pineapple packed in syrup, and a heavy sugar-cooked shred meant to be held as a dessert base. Both depend on the book's separate "Directions for Canning," which this page assumes you have already read.
- Read the referenced directions firstThe instruction "Follow Directions for Canning" is doing most of the work here, and those directions are not reproduced on this page. Nineteenth-century canning instructions of this kind generally have you cook the fruit and seal it into sterilised jars, which does not correspond to modern tested processing. Use current tested processing times for pineapple in your jar size and at your altitude rather than guessing from this page.
- Why pineapple is forgivingPineapple is genuinely acidic, around pH 3.3 to 4.0, so it belongs in the boiling-water-bath category rather than the pressure-canner one. The failure mode with an underprocessed jar is mould and yeast spoilage, not the botulism risk that stalks low-acid vegetables and meats.
- Choosing the fruitThe eyes and the fibrous core are cut away because they stay woody however long they are cooked. Modern supermarket pineapples are usually shipped ripe; a fruit that smells sweet at the base and gives slightly to pressure will can far better than a green one, which no amount of syrup will sweeten.
- "One-half their weight of sugar"For the shredded version this is a true ratio, not a fixed quantity: 2 lb of prepared fruit takes 1 lb of sugar. Cooked without water, it draws its own juice out within a few minutes over low heat, then thickens to something between a preserve and a very heavy compote.
- Stirring the no-water packBecause there is no added liquid, the sugar can scorch before the fruit gives up its juice. Keep the heat low and stir steadily for the first several minutes; once the syrup runs freely the risk passes.
- Sherbets and "fancy desserts"The heavy sugar pack was valued because it could be thinned with water or juice and frozen directly, in a period when fresh pineapple was seasonal and expensive. It still works that way, and also as a filling for tarts or a spoon-over for ice cream.
- YieldThe original gives none. Trimming loss on a pineapple runs to roughly half, so a 3 lb fruit gives something like 1½ lb of cubes; the sugar-cooked shred reduces further still.
Canned and preserved pineapple appears in American cookbooks with increasing frequency in the later nineteenth century, once steamship routes began bringing Caribbean and Florida fruit to Eastern markets in quantity. Before that, pineapple was largely a luxury and a table ornament in the Northeast; the fact that a recipe of this kind treats it as an ordinary item for the household canning shelf, alongside peaches and berries, marks how quickly it had become available. The second method here, cooking shredded fruit in half its weight of sugar without water, reflects a practical concern of the era: sugar was the preservative as well as the sweetener, and a heavy pack kept better and travelled further than a light syrup. The mention of sherbets is a reminder that home ice cream and water ice were fashionable domestic accomplishments in the 1890s, and a jar of sweetened pineapple was the shortcut to one.