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Pineapple Sauce (Heat in a saucepan one)
Heat in a saucepan one and a half gills canned pineapple liquor with half gill granulated sugar and a small piece lemon peel (one quarter). Mix and let boil for six minutes. Add one teaspoon curacao. Mix a little. Remove the lemon peel and serve.
A two-ingredient dessert syrup built on the liquid drained from a can of pineapple, finished with orange liqueur. The whole thing takes under ten minutes.
- Gills, in cupsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of pineapple liquor is 6 fl oz (3/4 cup) and half a gill of sugar is about 2 oz (roughly 1/4 cup, 50 g). The finished sauce comes to about half a cup.
- "Pineapple liquor"This means the syrup drained from canned pineapple, not a spirit. Much canned pineapple today is packed in juice rather than heavy syrup, which is less sweet — taste before you add all the sugar, and expect a thinner, more acidic result than the original.
- The lemon peel"A small piece lemon peel (one quarter)" probably means a quarter of the peel of one lemon, pared thin; the recipe does not explain the parenthesis. Take only the yellow zest; white pith can turn the sauce bitter over six minutes of boiling.
- Six minutes of boilingThat is a real reduction, not a warming through. Six minutes at a boil in a small pan will drive off a noticeable amount of the liquid, and the sauce will thicken as it cools, so pull it while it still looks slightly loose.
- CuraçaoAn orange-peel liqueur; another orange liqueur such as triple sec or Cointreau will do the same job. The recipe adds it after the boiling is finished, though it does not say to remove the pan from the heat; adding it at the end keeps the aromatics from being boiled away.
- ServingThe book gives no application. This is a pouring sauce for ice cream, rice pudding, sponge or rolled pancakes, and it is good warm or chilled. Half a cup dresses four modest servings.
- KeepingCovered in the refrigerator it should keep several days. It will thicken as it chills; loosen it with a spoonful of water over low heat.
Sauces like this belong to the thrifty logic of the early canned-goods era: the syrup in the tin was paid for along with the fruit. Canned pineapple became widely and cheaply available in American and European kitchens in the first decades of the twentieth century as Hawaiian canneries scaled up, which is why a fruit that had been a hothouse luxury in the 1850s turns up here as a matter-of-course pantry item. The curaçao at the end reads as the hotel-dining-room touch.