Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Pineapple Ice Cream
Pineapple Ice Cream
3 pints cream. 1/2 cup sugar 1 can grated pineapple Add pineapple to cream, let stand thirty minutes; strain, add sugar, and freeze.
A three-line fruit ice cream from the era of the hand-crank freezer. The proportions are typical of Fannie Farmer's shorthand, and one key quantity has to be inferred.
- The missing cream measureThe ingredient line gives only sugar and pineapple, yet the method says "add pineapple to cream." Comparable recipes in this section use 1 quart of thin cream (or half cream, half milk) to a can of fruit, and that ratio works. Treat it as 1 quart.
- What "1 can" meantCanned grated pineapple of the period was commonly sold in a can of roughly 20 oz, close in size to what is sold today as crushed pineapple. Use it with its syrup; pineapple was generally packed in syrup then, so the half cup of sugar is added on top of whatever sweetness the can brings.
- Use canned, not freshThis is the hinge. Canned pineapple has been heat-processed, which destroys the bromelain in the fruit. Fresh or frozen pineapple still carries the active enzyme, which will break down the dairy proteins and leave the mixture thin and unpleasantly bitter.
- The thirty-minute standSteeping extracts pineapple flavour into the cream before the fibre is strained out. Do it in the refrigerator rather than on the counter, and press the pulp firmly in the strainer to recover the liquid.
- Straining is not optionalPineapple fibre freezes into hard threads that read as stringy in the finished cream. If you would rather keep some texture, strain as directed and stir a few spoonfuls of well-drained pulp back in at the end of churning.
- Sweetness and freezingHalf a cup of sugar to a quart of cream is lean by modern standards and gives a firm, rather icy set. An extra 1/4 cup will soften the texture; taste the strained mixture cold, since flavours mute once frozen.
- Freezing equipment"Freeze" means a bucket freezer packed with three parts crushed ice to one part rock salt, cranked until stiff. A modern ice cream machine does the same job, though a batch this size may exceed the working capacity of a smaller domestic churn and need to be split; chill the mixture thoroughly first, then ripen the churned cream an hour in the freezer.
- YieldAbout 1 1/2 quarts, or eight to ten servings.
Pineapple ice cream belongs to the moment when canned fruit made tropical flavours a year-round possibility in northern kitchens. Caribbean pineapple was being packed in eastern US canneries by the 1890s, and cookbooks of the period lean on it heavily precisely because the fresh fruit was expensive, seasonal and awkward to prepare. The recipe also reflects the mechanics of the household ice cream freezer: cream, sugar and flavouring, cranked in a salted ice bath, with no eggs and no cooking. Farmer's brevity here is not carelessness but house style, since the general method for freezing was set out once at the head of the chapter and every recipe after it assumes the reader has read it.