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Marshmallow Delight
pound marshmallows Drain juice off pineapple and cut in cubes. Cut marshmallows in small pint heavy cream pieces. Combine with pineapple and set in refrigerator or in cool place . Combine with pineapple and set in refrigerator or in cool place several hours. Just before serving add cream whipped. Serve in sherbet glasses. of one medium pineapple
A three-ingredient icebox dessert of the type that filled community cookbooks between the wars. The whole point is the long rest in the cold, which lets the marshmallows soften into the pineapple juice and bind the mixture.
- Use canned pineappleCanned or fresh -- the fragmentary ingredient line mentions "one medium pineapple," while the instruction to drain juice off is equally consistent with a tin. Note that fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests the gelatin in marshmallows and will leave a loose, weeping mixture that never sets; canned pineapple, being heat-treated, does not.
- QuantitiesThe figures before "pound marshmallows" and "pint heavy cream" have not survived in this printing, so the exact amounts are unrecoverable.
- Marshmallow sizeMarshmallows of this era were sold as large single confections, cut up by hand as directed. Modern miniature marshmallows need no cutting and can be substituted by weight.
- ChillingSeveral hours means several hours; overnight is better. Under-chilled, the marshmallow pieces stay chewy and separate rather than melting into the fruit.
- The cream goes in lastWhip to soft peaks and fold in just before serving, as written. Whipped cream folded in early and left to sit will deflate and weep into the pineapple juice.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; it is served in sherbet glasses. It does not keep well once the cream is added, so assemble only what will be eaten.
Marshmallow-and-canned-fruit desserts were everywhere in American home cooking from the 1910s through the 1950s, and they depended on two industrial products arriving in the ordinary kitchen at once: commercially boxed marshmallows and canned Hawaiian pineapple, which became cheap and reliable after the canneries scaled up in the first decades of the twentieth century. Before that, marshmallow was a confectioner's item, whipped from gum or gelatin and sold by the piece. Recipes like this one, in which the marshmallow acts as sweetener, thickener and body all at once, belong to the same family as ambrosia and the many "delights" and "fluffs" of the community-cookbook era.