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English Pineapple Pie
Line a plate with puff paste, bake it 10 minutes, or longer, to raise the crust. Fill it with a puree of pineapple cooked with sugar, the juice of a lemon, and a little nutmeg or vanilla until thick. Pour over this a meringue as for lemon pie, of sugar and white of eggs, bake till a light brown. Serve cold.
MANHEIM ROLLS.(Germany.) Mix 2 eggs, 6 ounces flour, 2 ounces sugar, and 1 ounce of anise seed to a paste. Cut into long rolls, twist them, glaze with yolk of egg, and bake until brown. For afternoon tea or lunch.
Two recipes share this page: a blind-baked pineapple tart under meringue, and a small batch of anise-seed twists from Germany. Both assume a cook who already knows how to handle puff paste and a hot oven, and neither gives a temperature.
- "Line a plate"A pie plate, not a dinner plate; something around 9 inches is the likely size, though the book does not say. The 10-minute pre-bake sets and lifts the puff paste before the wet filling goes in — note that the recipe wants the crust raised, so it should not be weighted down.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives none. As a modern equivalent, puff paste wants a hot oven, around 425F, for that first 10 minutes; drop to 325–350F for the meringue, which needs only about 12–18 minutes to colour.
- Fresh versus canned pineappleCooking the puree until thick is not optional if you want it to hold. Raw pineapple also contains bromelain, a protease that stops gelatine setting and can break down milk proteins; cooking with sugar both thickens the puree and deactivates it. Canned crushed pineapple, drained, is already heat-treated and works well here.
- Quantities for the fillingNone are given. For a 9-inch shell, figure about 3 cups of pineapple puree with 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar, the lemon juice, and a grating of nutmeg, reduced until a spoon drawn through leaves a track.
- "A meringue as for lemon pie"A common ratio of the period is 3 egg whites to about 3–6 tablespoons sugar, beaten to firm peaks. Spread it so it touches the crust all round — that seal is what stops the meringue shrinking away from the edge as it cools.
- Serve coldMeaning fully cooled, not chilled overnight. A meringue pie held in the refrigerator for a day sweats, and the puff base softens.
- Manheim rolls: the weights6 ounces flour is about 1 1/3 cups, 2 ounces sugar about 1/4 cup. The dough is stiff, closer to a biscotti or pretzel dough than a batter; roll into ropes, twist in pairs, and bake at 350F for 15–20 minutes.
- One ounce of anise seedThat is roughly 4 tablespoons of whole seed in a dough made from just 6 ounces of flour — extremely assertive by modern taste. A teaspoon or two, lightly crushed, gives the same character. Scale up only if you know you like it.
- YieldThe pie serves 6 to 8. The roll dough makes about a dozen small twists, which is a single afternoon-tea plateful and stales quickly — bake them the day they are wanted.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a turn-of-the-century genre of cosmopolitan recipe collections, in which American housekeepers were offered dishes labelled by nation — an English pie here, German rolls immediately after, with no transition between them. Calling a pineapple pie "English" says a good deal about the period: pineapple had been the great trophy fruit of British hothouse gardening in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, grown at ruinous expense in heated pineries and displayed at table more often than eaten, and by the 1890s cheap Singapore canning had turned it into an everyday store-cupboard item. A meringue-topped fruit tart built on the familiar lemon-pie template is what that transition looks like in a domestic cookbook. The Manheim rolls are the German end of the same shelf — anise-scented twists often associated with the broad family of Anisbrezel and tea biscuits, where anise was the standard aromatic long before vanilla became cheap.