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Pineapple Cream
1 can grated pineapple 2 cups cream Make syrup by boiling sugar and water fifteen minutes; strain, cool, add pineapple, and freeze to a mush. Fold in whip from cream; let stand thirty minutes before serving. Serve in frappé glasses and garnish with candied pineapple.
A frozen fruit cream from the era of the hand-cranked freezer, written in the compressed style of the book's ice chapter — the sugar and water for the syrup are named in the method but their amounts are missing from the printed ingredient list.
- The missing quantitiesThe recipe calls for a boiled sugar syrup but gives no measure for either sugar or water; the amount is genuinely unrecoverable from the page as printed.
- "Whip from cream"This means the stiff froth skimmed off the top of partly whipped cream, not the whole whipped mass; the thinner cream left behind was generally beaten again. Whipping 2 cups of cream to soft peaks and folding all of it in gives much the same effect in a modern kitchen.
- Fifteen minutes of boilingA boil of this length concentrates the syrup considerably; a shorter boil to clarity, then thorough chilling, is closer to what the finished texture wants.
- "Freeze to a mush"The hinge of the dish. The pineapple syrup goes into the freezer only until it is thick and slushy, not solid — the cream must be folded into something soft enough to accept it without breaking. In a machine, stop while it still slumps; in a pan, stir every 20 minutes and fold in the cream at the slush stage.
- Canned, not freshCanned pineapple is heat-treated, which destroys bromelain. Fresh pineapple keeps the enzyme active, which can give dairy a thin, slightly bitter character, so cook the fruit first if substituting. A 20 oz can of crushed pineapple is a reasonable modern stand-in for "1 can grated."
- Frappé glassesSmall stemmed glasses, roughly the size of a modern coupe. The half-hour rest before serving lets the mixture firm and mellow.
Pineapple in a can was still something of a novelty at the turn of the twentieth century. Commercial canning of Hawaiian pineapple expanded rapidly in that period, and grated or crushed pineapple in tins was something an ordinary New England household could keep on a shelf year round — which is exactly why the recipe specifies a can rather than a fruit. The dish belongs to a family of frozen creams in which a fruit syrup is churned to a slush and lightened with whipped cream, and the frappé glass and candied-fruit garnish place it firmly among the dressed-up desserts meant for company rather than family supper.