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Pine-Apple Sauce
Mix two table-spoons butter and four heaping table-spoons sugar (some add white of an egg), flavor with pine-apple (or any other flavoring), form a pyramid, and with a tea-spoon shape it like a pine-apple. Or, to a grated pine-apple add a very little water, simmer until quite tender, mix with it, by degrees, half its weight in sugar, boil gently for five minutes, and serve.
Two unrelated sauces sit in one paragraph: a moulded hard sauce flavored with pineapple essence, and a cooked fresh-pineapple sauce. Read the sentence break as a divider and make one or the other.
- The ratio is the whole first recipeTwo tablespoons butter to four heaping tablespoons sugar is roughly 1 part butter to 3 parts sugar by volume. Use softened, not melted, butter and confectioners' sugar; granulated will stay gritty in an uncooked sauce, and the mixture will soften and lose its moulded shape if it is allowed to warm.
- "Flavor with pine-apple"This means pineapple essence or extract from a bottle, not fruit. A teaspoon is ample for this quantity; fresh juice will loosen the paste and make it weep.
- The optional egg whiteThe white is beaten in to lighten the sauce and it is never cooked. Leave it out, or use pasteurized white, if anyone eating is pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised.
- ShapingChill the mass until firm, mound it into a cone, then press the bowl of a teaspoon over the surface in overlapping rows to suggest the rind. Keep it cold until it goes to the table.
- Fresh pineapple in the second versionGrate or finely crush the fruit and include the juice. The "very little water" is a splash to keep it from catching before the juice runs; a couple of tablespoons is enough for a whole pineapple.
- Half its weight in sugarThis is by weight of the grated pulp, so about 8 oz sugar to 1 lb fruit. Add it in stages off the boil so it dissolves, then bring back to a gentle simmer.
- Five minutes is rightThe short boil is deliberate: it sets a loose, pourable sauce rather than jam and keeps the fruit's flavor bright. Pineapple's bromelain is deactivated by this heat, so the cooked version can be used with dairy and gelatin puddings, where the raw fruit's enzyme causes trouble.
- Canned fruitCrushed pineapple works, but fruit packed in syrup is already sweetened; with that, start with a third of the sugar and taste.
- YieldThe hard sauce makes about a scant half cup, enough for four small servings. The cooked sauce from one medium pineapple gives roughly two to three cups.
Hard sauce — butter creamed with sugar, flavored, chilled and served in a shaped lump against a hot pudding — was standard equipment in nineteenth-century American kitchens, generally under that name. Moulding it into a fruit or pyramid was a modest bit of table display of the sort The Dixie Cook Book (compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox and published in the 1880s) offered to households aiming at refinement without much equipment. Pineapple reached Southern tables of the period either as a bottled flavoring extract or, increasingly toward the end of the century, in tins from Baltimore and later Hawaii canneries; fresh fruit came up from Florida and the Caribbean by rail and steamer and was expensive enough that a whole one grated into a sauce counted as a display of its own.