No. 3666

Canned Pineapple

Ananas en Boites

Pare neatly some fine ripe pineapples; remove the hard centers with a tin tube, then split them lengthwise in two; cut across in quarter-inch thick slices and range these in tin cans of one quart capacity each. Fill the cans nine-tenths full with cold twelve degree syrup; cover and solder, then place them in a large saucepanful of cold water so they are entirely submerged, and covering the pan stand on the fire and allow the liquid to boil for fifteen minutes. Remove the cans, punch a small hole on top to allow the air to escape and solder immediately; replace the saucepan and allow to boil five minutes more. If whole pineapples, merely cored, are used instead of slices they will require forty minutes boiling, and if not cored one hour will be found a correct time.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer's method is professional canning as practised in a nineteenth-century hotel kitchen, using tin cans closed with a soldering iron. The fruit itself is unobjectionable; the container and the seal are the problem.

Soldered tin cansThe sealing method here is hand-soldering, and through the nineteenth century that solder was overwhelmingly lead-tin. Lead migrates readily into acidic contents such as pineapple in sugar syrup, and there is no safe level of dietary lead. This alone puts the recipe out of reach.
The vent-and-reseal stepPunching a hole in a hot can to release steam and closing it again with molten solder is a two-handed operation over boiling water with a pressurised container. It was standard commercial practice with proper tools and a bench; it is not something to attempt improvised.
Processing time is short by current standardsProcessing time -- The fifteen minutes plus five is at best comparable to modern tested schedules for quart containers of pineapple, with no margin, and the forty-minute and one-hour figures for whole fruit rely on heat penetration through a dense mass that no home cook can verify. Use a current tested boiling-water-bath recipe from a food-safety authority if you want to can pineapple.
Twelve degree syrupDegrees Baumé, read with a saccharometer, not degrees of temperature. Twelve Baumé is a light syrup of roughly 22 percent sugar by weight — on the order of a cup and a third of sugar to a quart of water.
Nine-tenths fullThe remaining tenth is headspace, deliberately left so the contents can expand and the air can be driven out during processing. In a quart that is roughly half to three-quarters of an inch at the top.
The tin tubeA straight-sided cylindrical cutter for coring, the ancestor of the modern pineapple corer. Ranhofer treats the core as inedible; some modern cultivars have a core tender enough to eat.
YieldA large ripe pineapple, pared and cored, fills roughly one quart sliced. The original gives no count.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of thirty-odd years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and its preserving chapter reflects a restaurant that put up its own stores rather than buying them in. Pineapple reached the eastern United States by fast steamer from the Caribbean and was still a display fruit — expensive, seasonal, and worth the trouble of preserving. Ranhofer's soldered tin cans and Baumé syrup are commercial technique scaled to a professional kitchen; the glass jar with a rubber ring and screw band, patented in the 1850s and by then in wide domestic use, was the housewife's equivalent. Large-scale pineapple canning in Hawaii, which would make the fruit an everyday tinned commodity, took hold only in the decade after this book appeared.