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Pineapple Fritters Au Maraschino
Remove the stalks, peel and cut out all the eyes of a small, sound pineapple. Core and cut into even slices, place in a saucepan with two ounces sugar and three gills water; let boil for five minutes, take up the slices with the skimmer and drain them on a cloth, reduce the sauce to half the quantity on the range, pour in two tablespoons of maraschino and keep warm. Prepare a batter for fritters. Roll the pineapples in the batter, then plunge in boiling fat, one by one, and fry for ten minutes, turning once in a while with a skimmer. Lift them up, drain on a cloth, neatly trim, pour the maraschino sauce on a dish and dress the pineapples over; sprinkle a little powdered sugar over and serve.
A straightforward poach-then-fry dessert, but two details in the original will mislead a modern cook: the frying time and the word maraschino.
- Fry for two to three minutes, not tenThe pineapple is already cooked through from its five minutes in syrup, so the fritters only need long enough to set and colour the batter — roughly two to three minutes at 350-375F, turning once. Ten minutes in fat that hot gives a dark, greasy crust and a collapsed centre.
- Maraschino means the liqueurThis is the clear, dry, faintly bitter cherry distillate of Dalmatian origin (Luxardo is the familiar bottling), not the sweet red syrup from a jar of cocktail cherries. Substituting the syrup gives you sugar and dye and nothing of the almond-and-stone character the sauce depends on.
- Gills and ouncesA gill is half a cup, so three gills is 1 1/2 cups of water. Two ounces of sugar is a weight — about 1/4 cup granulated.
- Dry the slices properlyDrain the poached rings on a cloth and let them cool and dry; batter slides straight off warm, wet fruit. A light dusting of flour before dipping helps it hold.
- Core and sliceRings about 1/3 inch thick hold together best. A small pineapple will give enough rings for roughly four servings.
- Reducing the sauce"Reduce on the range" means simmer the poaching syrup down to about 3/4 cup, until it coats a spoon lightly. Add the maraschino off the heat so the aroma is not driven off, and keep it warm rather than hot.
- Fresh versus cannedFresh pineapple is what is intended, and the poaching step both tenderises it and tames the bromelain that makes raw pineapple sting the mouth. Canned rings in juice can be used, drained well, but skip straight to a brief warming in the syrup.
Fritters of this kind — fruit poached in syrup, battered, fried, and served in a pool of liqueur-scented sauce — were standard in the repertoire of hotel and restaurant kitchens working in the French manner. The dressing of the dish, with the sauce poured on the platter first and the fritters arranged over it, is service-style plating rather than home cooking. Maraschino itself was a luxury import, distilled from marasca cherries around Zadar on the Dalmatian coast and widely traded in the nineteenth century; its later use as a flavouring for brined cocktail cherries is what eventually attached the name to the fruit rather than the spirit. Pineapple appearing here as an unremarkable ingredient is itself a marker of date: by the 1900s it had ceased to be a hothouse curiosity and had become something a cook could reasonably be told to buy small and sound.