Home › Our Susan's Opinion of a Kitchen › Pine-Apple Jam
Pine-Apple Jam
Mrs. P. B. Ayer.
Grate your pine-apple; to one pound of the apple add three-fourths of a pound of loaf sugar; boil ten minutes.
Two ingredients and one line of instruction, which leaves the cook to supply the judgment. The main thing to understand is that ten minutes gives a loose, bright, fresh-tasting conserve rather than a firm set.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a hard cone and broken or scraped off as needed. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct substitute, weight for weight.
- ProportionsThree-quarters of a pound of sugar to a pound of fruit is roughly 1 2/3 cups sugar per pound of grated pineapple. This is a low-sugar ratio by preserving standards, which is part of why the result stays soft.
- Grating the fruitPeel, core and grate on the coarse side of a box grater, or pulse briefly in a food processor, catching all the juice. A large pineapple gives roughly 1 1/2 to 2 lb of usable flesh, which with the sugar will fill several half-pint jars.
- Ten minutes is not a setPineapple is low in pectin and high in water. Ten minutes of hard boiling drives off some liquid and dissolves the sugar, but the jam will thicken only on cooling and will remain spoonable rather than sliceable. Boiling considerably longer darkens it and dulls the fresh flavour, which is presumably why the time is kept short.
- Watch for scorchingGrated pineapple is dense and catches easily once the sugar concentrates. Use a wide, heavy pan, stir steadily through the whole ten minutes, and skim the foam that rises.
- Canned pineappleCrushed canned pineapple works, but reduce the sugar to allow for the syrup it is packed in, and expect a flatter flavour. Drain the syrup off and add it back only if the pan looks dry.
- StorageThe recipe gives no processing instructions and none should be improvised. Treat this as a refrigerator jam, keep it covered and cold, and use it within about three weeks; freeze anything beyond that. For a shelf-stable jar, follow a current tested water-bath process.
Pineapple was a luxury import in nineteenth-century North America, arriving by schooner from the Caribbean, and its appearance in a community cookbook like The Home Cook Book marks a household with some money and access to a good grocer. Grating rather than chopping seems often to have been the preferred treatment: it broke down the tough fibrous flesh that makes pineapple awkward to preserve in pieces, and released the juice that carried the sugar. The short boil is characteristic of fruit jams made before commercial pectin, when cooks are generally thought to have accepted a softer conserve rather than overcook a fruit whose whole appeal was its perfume. Contributor recipes signed with a name, as this one is, were the currency of the subscription cookbook: such books were typically compiled by and for the women of a congregation or charity, and the attribution was both a credit and a guarantee.