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Pineapple Cream
(France.) Chop and core 1 large ripe pineapple, add 9 ounces of sugar and 2 tablespoonfuls of brandy, and set aside 2 hours. Cook the peel and core in 1/2 pint water for 1 hour, strain, cool it, and add to the rest. Boil it 1/4 hour, skim it, add 3/4 ounce melted gelatine, cook 10 minutes longer, add 1 1/2 pints cream. Whisk until frothy, set in a mould on ice. Turn out on a glass dish when firm.
A pineapple bavarois in all but name: fruit macerated in sugar and brandy, a syrup drawn from the trimmings, gelatine, and a great deal of whipped cream. The instructions assume a cook who already knows how a moulded cream behaves.
- Boil the pineapple, alwaysFresh pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that cuts gelatine to pieces and leaves the mould a soup. The quarter-hour boil here is what destroys it, so treat that step as non-negotiable and do not fold in any raw pineapple at the end for texture.
- Gelatine quantitiesThree-quarters of an ounce of sheet or powdered gelatine is roughly three envelopes of modern powder. Bloom it in a few tablespoons of cold water before adding rather than melting it dry over heat.
- Pints and ouncesThis is an American book of about 1900, so a pint is 16 fluid ounces: half a pint of water is one cup, and a pint and a half of cream is three cups. Nine ounces of sugar is a generous cup and a quarter by weight.
- Temperature of the creamLet the gelatine syrup cool to lukewarm and thickening before the cream goes in, or the heat will slacken whipped cream and the mixture will separate into a jelly layer and a foam layer in the mould. Whip the cream to soft peaks separately and fold.
- "Set in a mould on ice"A refrigerator does the same work. Four to six hours chilled, or overnight, gives a cleaner turn-out than an ice bath.
- Turning outOil the mould very lightly, then dip it in warm water for ten seconds and invert onto the chilled glass dish. Wetting the dish first lets you slide the cream into the centre if it lands crooked.
- YieldWith three cups of cream plus a whole pineapple, this needs a mould of at least two quarts and will serve ten or more. Halve it for a household.
- BrandyThe two tablespoonfuls are for flavour, not preservation; since they go in with the macerating fruit, which is then boiled, much of the alcohol will cook away. Kirsch or dark rum is a reasonable substitute.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a small genre of turn-of-the-century American books that collected dishes country by country, and the parenthetical "(France.)" is doing the work of a provenance label rather than a place of origin. What is described is essentially a bavarois, the gelatine-set cream that French pastry cooks had standardised through the nineteenth century and that anglophone books called Bavarian cream: a flavoured base, isinglass or gelatine, whipped cream, a decorative mould. Pineapple was the luxury note. By 1900 imported pineapple, fresh and canned, was reaching American markets in greater quantity, and faster steamship carriage had made whole fresh fruit merely expensive rather than extraordinary, which is why a recipe like this can afford to simmer the peel and core for stock instead of throwing them out. The trick of extracting a second, thinner syrup from trimmings shows a kitchen still in the habit of using everything.