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Pineapple Meringue
Peel a medium-sized pineapple, slice and then cut into pieces about an inch in length and a quarter of an inch thick, place in a preserving-pan with a half pound of crushed loaf-sugar and half a pint of water, stirring it well over the fire until it is reduced to a rather thick syrup; then pour a pint and a half of milk into a saucepan over the fire, and when it comes to a boil put into it the trimmings of the pineapple, cover it with the lid, and steep for about ten minutes. Beat the yolks of ten eggs, strain the milk and stir it gradually in with them; then pour the milk and eggs again into the saucepan and stir it over the fire until thick, but do not allow it to boil. Press the cream through a silk sieve into a basin and mix the pineapple and the syrup with it. When cold, put the cream in a freezing-pot and work well over the ice until it is frozen. Then put the frozen cream in a plain, oval-shaped mould, filling it to the top, close tightly, and pack well in pounded ice and salt. Boil four ounces of sugar to the sixth degree, and whip the whites of five eggs to a stiff froth, mix the sugar with them and leave until cold. Turn the contents of the mould quickly over a dish that has been placed on ice, pour the meringue over, and put in a hot oven just to set, and lightly brown the meringue and take out and serve it at once.
This is a frozen pineapple custard turned out of a mould, masked in meringue, and flashed in the oven — an ancestor of baked Alaska. The whole thing depends on the ice cream being frozen hard and the oven being hot enough to colour the meringue in under three minutes.
- The hinge: cold centre, hot ovenThe moulded cream must be packed in ice and salt until solid through, and the serving dish itself chilled. The book says only "a hot oven"; take that as a very hot oven judged by eye, and the dish stays in only until the meringue takes colour — a minute or two. Any longer and the custard slumps.
- "Boil four ounces of sugar to the sixth degree"This is the old French scale of sugar degrees. The numbering varies from book to book and was never standardised, so the sixth degree cannot be tied to one temperature; for a meringue of this kind a ball-stage syrup, somewhere around 238-240F, is the practical working target rather than a conversion.
- Loaf sugarRefined sugar sold in a hard cone or block, crushed before use. Ordinary granulated sugar is the direct replacement, weight for weight.
- Quantities in modern termsHalf a pound of sugar is 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; half a pint of water is 1 cup; a pint and a half of milk is 3 cups. Ten yolks to 3 cups of milk is a rich custard by any standard.
- The trimmingsThe core and the peel trimmings are steeped in the scalded milk for flavour, then strained out. Wash the peel first, and discard it after the ten minutes the recipe allows.
- Cooking the custard"Thick, but do not allow it to boil" means 175-180F, stirring constantly. It will curdle above about 185F. A silk sieve is simply a very fine strainer; fine nylon mesh or a chinois does the same work.
- Freezing-pot and iceAn ice-cream churn with ice and rock salt. A modern machine gives the same result; churn until stiff, then pack into a loaf or bombe mould, cover with parchment and film, and freeze solid overnight before unmoulding.
- YieldAbout 1.5 quarts of frozen cream, serving eight to ten. Assemble and brown immediately before it goes to the table.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) belongs to the era when a hot-oven meringue over frozen cream was one of the standard set pieces of a grand hotel dinner — the dish that in America came to be called baked Alaska and in French kitchens omelette surprise or omelette norvégienne. Its invention is traditionally credited to Delmonico's in New York in the 1860s, though the trick of shielding ice cream with meringue was described earlier and the attribution is best treated as legend rather than record. The pineapple suits the date: by the 1890s fruit shipped from the Caribbean and Florida was cheap enough to be cut up and cooked down into syrup, yet still worth naming in the title. The instruction to boil sugar "to the sixth degree" is a survival from the pre-thermometer confectioner's vocabulary of the professional kitchen, where stages of sugar were judged by hand and eye.