Pineapple Whip
This is a southern dish and in the south they know how to make the table attractive. You can obtain pineapple in any part of the United States almost every day in the year. Peel one carefully and mince into small bits or very fine. Whip a quart of cream or a pint, according to the size of your family, until it is all a fluff. Stir the two together and set on the ice until very cold. Serve with a delicate cake or cakes.
A two-ingredient dessert that lives or dies on how much pineapple juice gets into the cream. Everything else is straightforward.
- Drain the fruitMinced fresh pineapple releases a great deal of thin, acidic juice, and stirred into whipped cream it will slacken the whole bowl within the hour. Mince it, let it sit in a sieve for 15 minutes, and fold in the drained pulp only.
- Whip to soft peaks, then foldThe original says whip "until it is all a fluff" and then "stir the two together." Take the cream just past soft peaks and fold the fruit in with a spatula; stirring at that stage knocks the air out.
- No sugar is givenThe recipe leaves the cream unsweetened, to be eaten with sweet cake. If your pineapple is tart, 2-3 tablespoons of sugar per pint of cream is enough, added before whipping.
- "Set on the ice"An icebox instruction, meaning refrigerate until thoroughly chilled. Half an hour is plenty; beyond two or three hours it begins to weep, so assemble it close to serving.
- Quantities and yieldA quart of cream whips to roughly two quarts and, with one pineapple, serves ten to twelve. A pint serves five or six. One medium pineapple yields about 3 cups of minced fruit, which is generous for a pint of cream.
- Do not try to set it with gelatinFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests gelatin and will leave a gelatin-stiffened version permanently soupy. Canned pineapple, being heat-treated, does not have this problem.
- "A delicate cake"Sponge cake, ladyfingers or plain sugar cookies. The point is a dry, unfrosted crumb to carry the cream.
The Twentieth Century Cook Book appeared when fresh pineapple had only recently become an everyday sight in northern American markets, and the headnote makes a point of it: refrigerated rail and steamship freight from Florida and Cuba meant a fruit that had once been a luxury could be bought "almost every day in the year." The attribution to the South is often said to reflect a convention of turn-of-the-century cookbooks, which credited Southern households with elegance at table generally rather than with any documented origin for a particular dish. "Whip" as a dessert name is older than this book and covers a whole family of preparations in which whipped cream is folded with fruit, wine or preserves; the pineapple version simply put the newly available fruit into an existing form.