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Pineapple Jelly
Select pineapples that are perfectly ripe, pare them as thin as possible and remove the eyes; grate the pineapples, and to every breakfast cupful of the grated fruit add a quarter of a pound of white sugar, allowing it to stand for three hours. Place it then on the stove in a preserving-pan, and let it come slowly to a boil, and continue boiling very gently until the fruit is quite soft; then pour it while hot into a jelly-bag, and have the syrup drain through without squeezing into an earthenware basin, leaving it in the bag until the syrup has drained from it. Then to each breakfast cupful of syrup add a quarter of a pound of white sugar, and boil slowly, skimming at frequent intervals. After it has been boiling for about a quarter of an hour, take a small quantity of it up in a saucer to cool; if it is stiff the jelly is done, if not, continue the boiling operation for a time longer. When done, let it cool until it is lukewarm, then pour into glasses. When quite cold and set, cover the glasses with white paper wet with brandy, dip some more pieces of white paper into beaten white of egg, and fasten over the tops of the glasses to keep out the air. They should keep until wanted if carefully prepared in this manner.
A two-stage sugar jelly: fruit and sugar are cooked, strained, then the syrup is boiled again to setting point. The hinge is the second boil — pineapple is low in pectin, so the set comes almost entirely from concentration, and the saucer test is the only reliable guide.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz; treat it as a standard 1-cup measure. A quarter pound of sugar is about 115 g, or a generous half cup.
- Expect a soft setPineapple carries very little pectin, so this will finish as a thick, spoonable syrup rather than a firm cut-and-hold jelly. Boiling the strained syrup to 220°F (104°C) gives the best result the fruit is capable of; a squeeze of lemon juice helps, though it is not in the original.
- Fresh fruit onlyGrating is easiest with the coarse side of a box grater or a few pulses in a food processor after coring. Canned pineapple has already been cooked in syrup and will give a flat, one-note jelly.
- Do not squeeze the bagForcing the pulp through clouds the jelly with fibre. Hang the bag over a bowl and let it drip until it stops, which may take several hours; a jelly bag, a double layer of scalded muslin in a colander, or a nut-milk bag all work.
- Preserving-panUse the widest heavy pan you have — a wide surface evaporates faster, which shortens the boil and keeps the fruit flavour bright. Enamelled cast iron or stainless steel; nothing reactive.
- Pour hot, not lukewarmWaiting until lukewarm risks the syrup beginning to set in the pan. Fill clean hot jars while the jelly is still fluid and hot.
- The paper and brandy coverBrandy-dampened paper sealed with egg white was the standard nineteenth-century closure and it is not a reliable barrier by current standards. Use screw-top jars and keep the finished jelly in the refrigerator, or follow a current water-bath canning procedure for shelf storage.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; expect a small return, on the order of a couple of half-pint jars, depending on how far the second boil is taken.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maître d'hôtel, published his cook book in 1896, and it is a curious hybrid: hotel cookery for a hundred covers sits beside plain household preserving of exactly this kind. Pineapple had shifted within living memory from a luxury centrepiece — hired out by the day in the eighteenth century, so the story goes — to a fruit that steamships from the Caribbean and Florida delivered to American cities cheaply enough to put up in quantity. The two-boil method, straining the fruit out and then reducing the clear syrup, is the classic distinction between a jelly and a jam or marmalade, and the brandy-soaked paper with an egg-white overlay was the ordinary way of closing a jar before the screw-band lid became universal in home kitchens.