Home › The World's Kitchen › Pineapple with Rum
Pineapple with Rum
Trim and neatly peel a small ripe pineapple. Cut it into quarters lengthwise, cut out the stalk in the middle, then slice each quarter into fine slices; place in a bowl, add three ounces powdered sugar, half gill good rum and half gill cold water; gently turn in the seasoning without breaking for five minutes. Cover the bowl and let stand in a cool place for thirty minutes, being careful to mix in the rum meanwhile. Transfer into an edged dessert dish, pour all the seasoning over and serve.
A maceration rather than a cooked dish, so the whole thing hinges on the fruit and on giving the sugar time to draw out juice. Two archaic measures need translating before you start.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz). You need 1/4 cup rum and 1/4 cup cold water in total.
- "Powdered sugar"In books of this period the term usually means finely ground granulated sugar, closer to today's caster or superfine sugar, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar sold under that name now. Three ounces is roughly 6 to 7 tablespoons (a scant half cup) of superfine sugar; confectioners' sugar will work but leaves a slightly cloudy syrup.
- Choosing the pineappleThere is no cooking to rescue an underripe fruit. Pick one that smells sweet at the base and gives slightly to pressure; a small ripe pineapple weighs roughly 2 to 3 lb.
- The core"Cut out the stalk in the middle" means the fibrous core, which runs the length of each quarter. Removing it is not optional here since the slices are served raw and uncut cores stay woody.
- "Gently turn without breaking"Fold with a spatula or your hands rather than stirring with a spoon. Thin raw pineapple slices shear easily, and broken fruit turns the dish to pulp in the syrup.
- The restThirty minutes in a cool place is the minimum for the sugar to dissolve and pull juice from the fruit; up to two hours in the refrigerator improves it. Turn it once or twice during that time, as the recipe says, so the rum does not sit in a layer at the bottom.
- RumA dark or aged rum gives more character than white; the alcohol is not cooked off, so the flavor you pour in is the flavor you serve.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number; one small pineapple will serve about four. An "edged dessert dish" is presumably a shallow bowl with a rim high enough to hold the syrup.
Fresh pineapple with sugar and spirits belongs to a moment when the fruit had just become obtainable in northern cities without being a luxury spectacle. Through most of the nineteenth century a whole pineapple reached the American or European table by sail from the Caribbean and was expensive enough to be rented as a centerpiece, according to a much-repeated tradition; faster steamships, refrigerated holds and expanding plantations in Cuba and Florida brought the price down by the 1890s. The pairing with rum follows the fruit's own geography, both being products of the sugar islands. It is tempting to see in it a restaurant dessert of its day: no cooking, no gelatin, no molding, just good fruit, sugar and spirit left alone for half an hour, the kind of thing a professional kitchen could send out at short notice.