Pineapple Water Ice: So easy, but so good

Pineapple juice is too good to throw away.

Pineapple Water Ice ⅔ cup sugar ⅔ cup water 1 cup pineapple juice Mix the sugar and water in a saucepan. Boil and stir until dissolved and clear. Measure out one cup of this syrup and add it to the pineapple juice while still hot. Freeze in an ice cream machine. (Depending on your machine's directions, you may need to chill the mixture first.) Ginger-Pineapple Water Ice: Make the syrup with ginger tea instead of water. Note: You can easily adjust this for however much pineapple juice you have (say, if you're making a small batch using the juice you drained off a can of pineapple). Just use equal amounts of juice and syrup. Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1844 edition

When a recipe starts with draining a can of pineapple, I hate discarding the juice. I often drink it on ice, but this time I decided to put the juice in the fridge until I decided what to do with it. I might have put it in cake batter, but that would require turning on the oven in this horrible heat. Then I realized: We can make water ice!

Directions for Cookery in its Various Branches, Miss Leslie, 1844 edition

Eliza Leslie (or, as she billed herself on her own title pages, Miss Leslie of Philadelphia) appended a lot of water ices to the end of her cookbook as the editions kept going. Actually, she tacked on a lot of unsorted recipes over the years. (Eventually, she decided that had added so many that she just wrote another book.)

It's very fitting that a proudly Philadelphian cookbook writer would have so many water ices in her book. It's still a popular hot-weather treat in Philadelphia to this day. 

Getting to today's recipe, I always thought they were too expensive to eat in Miss Leslie's time. But her book has recipes for preserved pineapples (she preserves them whole with the green tops still attached), pineapple ice cream, iced pineapple lemonade, and today's pineapple water ice. I don't know if she included such extravagances for the sake of wealthier people who bought her book, or if pineapples were more affordable than I thought.

Now that we don't need to squeeze the juice out of a pineapple or skim the scum from of our sugar (back then, you had to get the dead bugs and detritus out of sugar every time you cooked), this recipe is ridiculously fast to make. We start off by making a syrup with a little bit of water and almost enough sugar for my cornflakes when I was six.

At this point, we only needed to add the pineapple juice to the syrup and start the ice cream machine. Really, I was going to call this recipe a hump-day quickie were it not for setting up the ice cream machine.

That's it. We're done.

While we're waiting for our pineapple ice to get cold enough to freeze, let's chat about the new machine. I have a mixed relationship with it.

On one hand, having to put those bowls in the freezer is annoying, though they don't take up any more space than a bag of ice. On the other hand, it is nice not to have to buy ice and hope it doesn't melt in the car.

However, the freezer bowls only have so much cold to give. With the usual kind of ice cream maker, you can repack half-frozen ice cream in a fresh round of ice and salt if the first round doesn't do it. With this one, you're kind of screwed if your ice cream doesn't freeze the first time. This means that not only must you remember to put the little bowls in the freezer beforehand, you also have to refrigerate your ice cream overnight. Cuisinart gives us no spontaneity.

 

But even if this machine isn't all I ever wanted, it does appeal to the part of me that used to open the washer and watch the laundry. (Well, I shouldn't say "used to.")

One of these days I'm going to dribble hot fudge sauce in there right before I turn off the motor.

I thought about adding some food coloring to make our water ice look more like it came from a pineapple, but then I decided not to bother. The wan-looking yellow I got "naturally" (if canned pineapple is natural) would be fine--- yellow snow jokes aside. But to my surprise, this froze into a beautiful snowy white. It just shows that we should always trust Miss Leslie except when she's boiling vegetables beyond their death. 

 

As I was getting the water ice out of the machine, I realized that I should have added some ginger to it. We've learned from my great-grandmother's newspaper clippings that pineapple and ginger go almost shockingly well together. But then again, Miss Leslie didn't put any ginger in her pineapple water ice, and she wrote one of the best-selling cookbooks of the century. 

I decided to make some ginger blondies just because I knew what I was missing. (The recipe is simple: add a lot of ginger to a batch of blondies.) And... these two went together like birthday cake and ice cream. 

I know this will surprise everyone, but pineapple water ice tastes like pineapple. It had the perfect texture, like a Slurpee without industrial chemicals in it. However, I wasn't prepared for how much this tasted like fresh pineapple. Somehow the canned taste froze away. So, I'm going to keep this recipe on hand for whenever I have to drain a can of pineapple. It'll be like a little bonus treat.