The heat wave has gone on so long that even my friends in Pennsylvania are hanging ceiling fans.
| Pineapple Dessert 1 medium can crushed pineapple (undrained) 6.6 oz (or a generous two cups) mini marshmallows ½ cup chopped pecans (or nuts of your choice), if desired 1 cup heavy cream Mix the marshmallows and pineapple. Let stand at room temperature until the marshmallows are dissolved (or mostly so), stirring occasionally. Then mix in the nuts. Whip the cream and fold it in. Refrigerate until firm. If you're making this more than one day ahead, just sprinkle nuts on top at serving time instead of mixing them in-- otherwise they'll go soft.
- Sarah O'Neil
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Even by Texas standards, this summer had been merciless. Since I have to park outside, I gave in to the weather and bought one of those car covers. I hope no aspiring thieves think a rare classic is wrapped in this slightly ambitious shower curtain.
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| I never thought I would be the sort of person who owns one of these. |
The heat also means we have gotten very judicious with our oven use. I cannot justify heating the kitchen for a single recipe until further notice. Baked indulgences in particular feel like an attack on the air conditioning. This brings us to our inadvertent series of oven-free desserts.
Today, we're making something from my great-grandmother's binder that is called "Pineapple Dessert." Even though this is attributed to "Sarah O'Neil," I can't decisively say who gets the credit. It's either from my great-grandmother's sister-in-law, or from said sister-in-law's mother who named her daughter after herself.
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| Recipes like this remind me that for all "the relatives from Chicago" were from, well, Chicago and also very Irish, they were also Midwestern. |
It seems they really liked pineapple in my great-grandmother's house. It shows up in a lot of her recipes, whether she handwrote them or pasted them.
From a historical standpoint, most of this book seems to come from around the time that canned pineapple was moving into every grocery store. The Depression may have pinched their budget like it did everyone else's, but at least pineapple had gotten cheap enough to eat instead of rent. So maybe they didn't necessarily love pineapple as obsessively as it may appear, but she inadvertently recorded her cooking from the specific moment in time when pineapple was the latest trend to sweep through kitchens.
Getting to the recipe itself, I'm rarely optimistic about something that is simply called [whatever] dessert. It usually means a bowl of semi-flavored goop. But this recipe comes with recommendations, and not just from the dead. Back when we first found the binder and I sent random images to everyone I thought would like it, one of my friends from Michigan said "I've made that pineapple dessert! It's pretty good!" So even though the recipe doesn't look too terribly promising, I know that at least one person in this millennium likes it.
However, the instructions didn't make sense. The first two words of the recipe are "Drain pineapple," but how would we dissolve the marshmallows in it? Additionally, previous recipes have taught me that crushed pineapple turns into flavorless fiber shreds after you squeeze the juice out of it.
Despite my misgivings (or perhaps because of them), I always follow questionable recipes to the letter in case they want to teach me something. However, in case this recipe wanted to teach me that even my great-grandmother was occasionally fallible (and not just with prune whips), I saved the juice I drained off. Also, I didn't drain the pineapple too well. I made sure it was still at least a little drippy.
Next, we get to the marshmallows. The recipe calls for two "small boxes" of marshmallows, and I had no idea how big that would be. I looked up old marshmallow boxes (vintage food packaging is a popular item on Ebay), but none of them listed the weight on the label. I next emailed the people who make Campfire Marshmallows (the brand that showed up the most often when looking for things like "marshmallow history") asking what their packaging sizes were in the 1930s and got no response.
Next and as I should have done at first, I call my local library. The first person made a game effort to find an actual number, and said "I'm not seeing any size. It looks like they didn't have to put the weight on them back then. But it looks like it's about the size of a Cracker Jack box. They're very small." In case I happened to contact the one reference department that didn't know how to track down 90-year-old food specifications, I selected another city's library at random and sent off a message, including the recipe for context. Whoever answered it redirected me to that area's historical society. I always associated historical societies with old buildings and Victorian clothes, but I sent them an email anyway. A few days later, I got a blessed answer: "It looks like a small vintage tin of marshmallows was about 3.5 ounces." They then included a link to a vintage shop and said "This one is 2 inches tall and 4.25 inches wide."
All of this to say that apparently "one small box" of marshmallows is about one cup of them.
Having resolved our package-size problems, it was time to let the marshmallows stand until dissolved. This seemed preposterous for aforementioned reasons, but I thought that perhaps the sugar in the marshmallows is meant to draw out all of the juice that remained in our pineapple, turning into fruit-flavored pineapple fluff. And indeed, as I stirred everything together, I could see little puddles of dissolution already welling up.
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| I see dissolved marshmallows at about six o'clock! |
Despite this early success, our marshmallows stopped dissolving barely after mixing them. Even though I left the incipient dessert out for half the day (stirring occasionally), it never got any more dissolved than its first few minutes.
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| This is after seven hours on the countertop. |
This brings us back to the pineapple juice that I made sure to save. I bifurcated our dessert and put the juice in half of it, thus pretending that I had never drained it. Perhaps on the advantage of being pre-soaked all day, our marshmallows dissolved by the time I had corralled all the dirty dishes into the sink.
I know this looks like a slimy mess, but keep in mind that the dissolved marshmallows make this a gelatin recipe. As we have learned on our unplanned gelatin journey, you need your salad (or dessert) to be a bit runny so that the gelatin has something to grab onto and turn into a jiggly masterpiece.
Meanwhile, let's see what we get if we make this as written:
Getting to the bottom of the ingredient list, I couldn't buy a single pint of cream in the supermarket near me. I had to go to multiple stores before I could find less than a quart of the stuff. A lot of random things besides cream pints have also gone quietly missing from the store lately. And I don't mean a temporary gap in the shelves until the restockers arrive-- a lot of things are just completely gone with their former space filled in by other things. In case you weren't already worried about the supply chain like it's 2020 again, the signs are piling up.
I added pecans to the batch that was made as directed, but then I tasted a nut before adding them to the other half of our creation. I should have done so before mixing them into the dessert at all. Our pecans had gone so rancid that they turned to walnuts. They did help the dessert look better, though. I think they broke up the white visual monotony. Also, I could see after a taste spoonful that nuts would have added a nice variation in texture and sweetness. Unfortunately, walnuts (whether they started out as such or not) always taste like bitter disappointment. I should note that I had purchased the ex-pecans only a day earlier, so it's not like they had rotted in the back shelf of one of the cabinets. It's nice to know that eliminating all those pesky regulations has given us the freedom to buy expired food at retail prices.
Well, one happy night in the refrigerator later, it was time to try our could-have-been-a-family-traditional pineapple dessert. This recipe was not good as written. Since the marshmallows had never dissolved into anything, we had globs of straight whipped cream interspersed with half-runny marshmallows and pineapple fragments. I'm going to guess that either my grandmother miscopied the recipe or I didn't understand some of the implied steps. Perhaps the instruction to "Drain pineapple; cut marshmallows in small pieces and add to fruit" should have actually read "...cut marshmallows in small pieces and add to fruit juice." Draining the pineapple juice for marshmallow-related purposes and then stirring it all back together redeems the recipe while adding a few pointless steps. And as we have seen, my great-grandmother sometimes cooked the long way whether it makes a difference or not. So we have precedent.
Correcting a theoretical transcription error also helps me tell myself that the one remaining recipe from "Sarah O'Neil" isn't a complete dud. I'd hate to think that what could be the last surviving piece of someone's existence isn't written evidence of disappointment.
Fortunately, I can end the recipe with success (even if we had to bend the directions a bit). The batch of undrained pineapple dessert came out really good. It turns out that if you put enough sugar on pineapple, you can barely tell it's canned. This was unexpectedly refreshing on a hot day, and agreeably quick to put together.
