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Pine-Apple Preserves
Wash fruit, and boil without paring until tender; take out, pare and slice lengthwise, leaving out the hard center. Pour a syrup (using a pound of sugar to one of fruit), boiling hot, over pineapples, and let stand until the next morning. Pour off syrup, boil until nearly thick enough, then add fruit, and boil fifteen or twenty minutes.
In making pickles use none but the best cider vinegar, and boil in a porcelain kettle-never in metal. A lump of alum size of a small nutmeg, to a gallon of cucumbers, dissolved and added to the vinegar when scalding the pickles the first time, renders them crisp and tender, but too much is injurious. Keep in a dry, cool cellar, in glass or stoneware; look at them frequently and remove all soft ones; if white specks appear in the vinegar, drain off and scald, adding a liberal handful of sugar to each gallon, and pour again over the pickles; bits of horse-radish and a few cloves assist in preserving the life of the vinegar. If put away in large stone jars, invert a saucer over the top of the pickles, so as to keep them well under the vinegar. The nicest way to put up pickles is bottling, sealing while hot, and keeping in a cool, dark place. Many think that mustard-seed improves pickles, especially chopped, bottled, and mangoes, but use it, as well as horse-radish and cloves, sparingly. Never put up pickles in any thing that has held any kind of grease, and never let them freeze. Use an oaken tub or cask for pickles in brine, keep them well under, and have more salt than will dissolve, so that there will always be plenty at the bottom of the cask. The brine for pickles should be strong enough to bear an egg; make it in the proportion of a heaping pint of coarse salt to a gallon of water. Use coarse salt, and test pickles by tasting before putting on vinegar (they should be of a pleasant saltness); if not salt enough, add salt to brine and allow them to stand until they have acquired the proper flavor; if too salt, cover with weak vinegar, and let stand for two or three days, drain, adding strong vinegar, either hot or cold according to recipes, and finish as directed. In the case of kegs of cucumbers kept in brine for a long time, to be used when needed, it is better to err in using too much salt, as this may be corrected by adding the weak vinegar, but if not sufficiently salted the pickles will be insipid. In scalding (254) cucumber pickles to green them, some use cabbage leaves, covering bottom, sides, and top of kettle. A medium spicing for a quart of pickles is a level tea-spoon of peppercorns (whole black peppers), , the same of allspice, a table-spoon of broken stick cinnamon, half a tea-spoon of cloves, mustard seed, or horse-radish chopped fine, and one piece of ginger root, an inch long. If ground cayenne pepper is used instead of whole peppers, an eighth of a tea-spoon is enough. A better substitute for peppercorns is gardenpeppers cut in rings , in proportion of two rings of green and one of red without seeds, or a level tea-spoon, when finely chopped, to a quart of pickles. These proportions may be increased or decreased to suit the taste, taking care not to put in SO much of any one as to make its flavor predominate. Ginger is the most wholesome of the spices. Cloves are the strongest, mace next, then allspice and cinnamon, and, of course, less of the stronger should be used. Pickles are not famous for wholesome qualities, even when made with the greatest care, but if they must be eaten, it is best to make them at home. Those sold in market are often colored a beautiful green with sulphate of copper, which is a deadly poison, or are cooked in brass or copper vessels, which produces the same result in an indirect way. Scalding or parboiling articles to be pickled makes them absorb the vinegar more easily, but does not add to their crispness. Before putting them in vinegar, after parboiling, they should be cold and perfectly dry. Always use strong vinegar, or the pickles will be insipid, and it should be scalding hot when poured on, as raw vinegar becomes ropy and does not keep well. As heating weakens it, vinegar for pickles should be very strong, and should only be brought to boiling point, and immediately poured on. pickles. Keep pickles from the air, and see that the vinegar is at least two inches over the top of pickles in the jar. A dry wooden spoon or ladle should be used in handling pickles, and is the only one that should touch pickles in the jars. If the vinegar loses its strength it should be replaced by good, poured over scalding hot.
The preserve itself is four sentences long and spread over two days. Everything that matters is in the first line: the fruit is cooked whole, in its skin, before it is ever peeled.
- Boil it whole firstSimmering the unpared pineapple in water until a skewer meets no resistance softens the flesh and makes the eyes and skin peel away cleanly. A ripe modern pineapple needs perhaps 20 to 30 minutes at a bare simmer, not the hour a hard, green-shipped fruit of the 1880s might have taken.
- Pound for poundThe original does not say whether to weigh the fruit before or after paring. Weigh the prepared slices, after the skin and core are gone, and match that weight in sugar.
- How much water in the syrupNo liquid is specified for the syrup. About a cup of water per pound of sugar dissolves it and gives enough volume to cover the fruit; the first day's soak draws juice out of the pineapple and thins it further.
- The coreThe "hard center" stays fibrous no matter how long it cooks. Cut it out and, if you like, simmer it with the peel to make a flavoured liquid for the syrup.
- "Nearly thick enough"On the second morning, reduce the drained syrup to just short of setting point, about 218F on a thermometer, before returning the fruit. Pineapple has little pectin, so the set comes from sugar concentration alone and will always be soft, more like fruit in heavy syrup than a stiff jam.
- Fifteen or twenty minutes, and no moreThe second boil is short on purpose. Slices held longer break down into shreds and the syrup caramelises and darkens.
- SealingThe recipe gives no instruction for putting the preserves up; paper-and-wax covers over a heavy sugar syrup were one common nineteenth-century method. Ladle into hot sterilised jars, leaving a quarter-inch of headspace, and process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes; refrigerate any jar that fails to seal.
- YieldThree pounds of prepared fruit with three pounds of sugar will fill a good many half-pint jars; have more clean jars ready than you expect to need and judge the yield as you fill.
Pineapple reached Southern kitchens by boat rather than by rail. Fruit came up from Cuba, the Bahamas and the Florida Keys into Gulf and Atlantic ports, arriving hard and often underripe, and many nineteenth-century recipes begin by boiling the whole fruit until it yields rather than assuming it can simply be sliced and eaten. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from the same editorial stable as the widely circulated Buckeye Cookery, treats it as a luxury worth the two-day trouble: preserving in equal weights of sugar was the standard way to hold a perishable imported fruit through the year, and a jar of pineapple preserves on the table said something about a household's reach. Commercially canned pineapple, which arrived with Hawaiian plantation packing in the 1890s, made this kind of labour optional within a generation.