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Pine-Apple Pie
A cup of sugar, a half cup butter, one of sweet cream, five eggs, one pine-apple grated; beat butter and sugar to a cream, add beaten yolks of eggs, then the pine-apple and cream, and, lastly, the beaten whites whipped in lightly. Bake with under crust only.-Mrs. Wm. Smith, Jacksonville, Florida.
A custard pie in the Southern manner: creamed butter and sugar bound with eggs and cream, poured raw into a single crust and baked until set. The pineapple is the complication.
- Bromelain is the hingeRaw pineapple carries bromelain, a protease that attacks egg and gelatin proteins and may keep the filling loose or weeping, though baking eventually denatures it. Simmering the grated fruit and its juice for about five minutes and cooling it before it meets the eggs is the safer course; canned crushed pineapple is already heat-treated and inert.
- "Sweet cream"Fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour or clabbered cream also kept in a nineteenth-century kitchen. Heavy cream is the closest match; a cup of half-and-half gives a lighter set.
- One pineapple, gratedA whole fruit yields roughly 2 cups of pulp with its juice; drain off excess liquid if the filling looks thin after mixing.
- OvenBake at 350F. A custard filling above roughly 175F internal will curdle and pull away from the crust, so pull the pie when the outer two inches are set and the centre still trembles; it firms as it cools.
- Under crust onlyAn open pie with a wet filling wants a blind-baked shell, weighted and baked at 400F until dry, then cooled. Otherwise the base goes soft under an hour of custard.
- The whitesWhipping the whites separately and folding them in is what lifts this above a plain custard, giving a soufflé-like top layer that settles slightly on cooling. Fold with a light hand and get the pie into the oven at once.
- YieldRoughly five cups of filling: enough for one deep 9-inch pie at most, and possibly two shallower ones. It will overflow a shallow tin.
Fresh pineapple was a luxury in most of the United States for much of the nineteenth century, which makes the attribution to a Jacksonville contributor telling: Florida had a brief but real pineapple industry along the Indian River and the Keys, generally said to have been finished off by some combination of imported fruit and hard freezes in the early twentieth century. A Florida cook could grate a whole fruit into a pie in a way a cook further north generally could not. The form itself is old and familiar — the same creamed butter, sugar, eggs and cream that carry a chess or transparent pie — with the fruit standing in for lemon or vinegar as the sharp note against all that richness. Community cookbooks of this period collected such regional signatures by name and town, which is why the book reads as a map as much as a manual.