Tag Archives: Pineapple

The King of Fruits: Pineapples and Class Culture in British Cookbooks from 1661-1850

By Elizabeth Schmidt

In 1789, John Taylor sent a pineapple to his mother Jean in Scotland; the pineapple was from his cousin’s plantation in Jamaica, where John lived and worked as a merchant. Not having seen the fruit before, Jean turned to friends for guidance. On November 20, she wrote to John: “I have not looked in to the Pine Apple yet as they tell me its only to show out a Grand Table & not to be eat.” Four months later she added, “I do not intend to open the Pin Apple till you Come.” Laying on maternal guilt to convince him to return for a visit, she promised John a party in his honor where the pineapple could sit center stage.

Native to South America, the pineapple was cultivated by Indigenous peoples across the Caribbean. The plant was called hoyriri or anona by the Tupi, and iaiama by the Taino. Columbus and his crew were probably the first Europeans to taste the fruit in Guadalupe, and they brought back a case of pineapples for King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Only one survived unspoiled enough to eat, but King Ferdinand declared it his favorite fruit after just one taste. In England, the first pineapple was presented to the king somewhere around 1661, a “queen-pine” from Barbados.[1] The fruit is quite beautiful: the hexagonal eyes around the body grow in a spiral sequence that are often cited as a three-dimensional representation of the Golden Ratio, and the leaves on the top of the pineapple are commonly referred to as its “crown.”[2]

In a painting by Hendrick Danckerts, ca. 1675-1680, King Charles II is presented with a pineapple. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In a painting by Hendrick Danckerts, ca. 1675-1680, King Charles II is presented with a pineapple. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Why did Jean’s friends tell her it was not to be eaten, and only “to show”? Even today, producers harvest and ship pineapples before they are perfectly ripe to ensure that the fruit reaches its destination while still attractive, since ripe fruit bruises easily and rots quickly. Unfortunately, once a pineapple is harvested, it does not continue to ripen.[3]

In eighteenth-century Scotland, Jean’s pineapple would have looked attractive but tasted terrible. Cookbook authors capitalized on this, offering instructions to preserve pineapples whole for repeated display. First seen in Elizabeth Raffald’s The Experienced English House-keeper (1769), preservation recipes were offered for readers who desired pineapple centerpieces. The fruit was brined for five days in saltwater, then boiled in a saucepan with the brining liquid. Then, the sugaring process began: the cook would submerge the pineapple in a thin sugar syrup for a week, remove it, re-boil the syrup, and then submerge again. This process was replicated over eight to ten weeks, with the syrup re-boiled two or three times in that period to prevent molding. Francis Collingwood refined these instructions in The Universal Cook and Country Housekeeper (1792): the pineapple was left in the jar for six to eight weeks, re-boiling the syrup every week. The final instruction was to remove the pineapple from the jar and cover it with a thick, cool, sugar syrup that had been boiled with slices of ginger, a natural preservative. According to Raffald and Collingwood, a pineapple preserved in this way would “keep several years, if tied down close with a bladder.” This preservation process had been used on fruit in Europe since the fourteenth century. Preservation played a key role in both cuisine and medicine through the eighteenth century, especially as diet remained a key element in managing health.[4]. In fact, Collingwood’s 1792 cookbook had similar instructions to preserve cherries with their stalks and leaves to “make a very pretty appearance in a desert [sic] by candle-light.”

By the mid-eighteenth century, aristocrats could buy pineapples grown in “pine-houses” rather than imported from the Caribbean. Dutch horticulturist Agnes Block experimented with propagating new pineapple plants from the crown of the fruit and successfully produced the first European-grown specimen in 1687. Later, horticulturists realized they could import whole plants from the West Indies: the plant is drought-resistant and capable of storing water in its leaves to keep it alive.[5] Soon elite estates across Britain built their own pine-houses. Cookbooks aimed at the upper classes introduced recipes for pineapple desserts as early as 1732, when Richard Bradley included a pineapple tart in The Country Housewife and Lady’s Director. In 1770, Borella’s The Court and Country Confectioner, a book clearly aimed at either royal or aristocratic houses, included two recipes for “Anana, or Pine Apple Cream Ices.” By the mid-nineteenth century, pineapple recipes were much more numerous yet still aimed at the upper classes. Charles Francatelli’s The Modern Cook (1846) had ten recipes with pineapple, including fritters, souffles, and brioche. Yet Francatelli was the chef to Queen Victoria, and his cookbook did not purport to be written for the average English housewife.

The practice of displaying pineapples continued long after recipes were developed for baking them into sweet treats. In P. Masters’s Young Cook’s Assistant, and Housekeeper’s Guide (1841), the recipe for “Pine Apple Cream” tells readers that “the pine must be quite ripe – one too ripe for the table will do for this purpose.” Cookbooks authored for the “middling classes” kept including the preservation recipe first written by Raffald, as pineapples remained quite expensive. A 1787 memoir of a London actress tells the story of finding pineapples for sale for one pound per fruit. The author remarks of the actress that “for the first time since I knew her, she declined to gratify her inclination at such an expence.”[6] At the coronation of King George IV in 1821, hundreds of hothouse pineapples were purchased for the banquet.[7] Some were certainly eaten, but others were displayed on tables as exotic centerpieces, as showcased in a painting of the event by Denis Dighton (1821)

The Third and Last Challenge by the Champion during King George IV's Coronation Banquet in Westminster Hall (1821). At intervals along the table, you can see the yellow pineapples with their green crowns. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The Third and Last Challenge by the Champion during King George IV’s Coronation Banquet in Westminster Hall (1821). At intervals along the table, you can see the yellow pineapples with their green crowns. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

So, while John probably thought he was sending his mother an exotic, expensive, and exciting gift, he actually sent her a project: a fruit that required significant labor to transform it into a centerpiece she could showcase.
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Elizabeth M. Schmidt is a recent PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara specializing in British Atlantic foodways of the eighteenth century. From roast beef to turtle soup, she researches the intersection of eating and identity during the Age of Revolutions and imperial turmoil. Using microhistories of figures like sailors, military generals, merchants, and housewives, she explores the impact of foodways on discussions of identity, belonging, inclusion, and exclusions. Elizabeth also enjoys cooking historical manuscript recipes, translating eighteenth and nineteenth century instructions, measurements, and tools into their modern equivalent to learn what she can about culinary knowledge and labor.

[1] Kaori O’Connor, Pineapple: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), 17-20.

[2] Judithlynne Carson, “Fibonacci Numbers and Pineapple Phyllotaxy,” The Two-Year College Mathematics Journal 9:3 (June 1978): 132.

[3] Fran Beauman, The Pineapple: King of Fruits (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 6.

[4] Anne Stobart, Household Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

[5] Bauman, The Pineapple, 31; O’Connor, Pineapple, 24.

[6] Elizabeth Steele, The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley. Late of Drury-Lane Theatre (Dublin, 1787), 90.

[7] Sir Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: Harper Collins, 2005), 33; James Jennings, Two Thousand Five Hundred Practical Recipes in Family Cookery (London, 1837), lv.

Thomas Tryon’s Harmless Cocoe-Nut Water

By Andrea Crow

Mouthfeel was only the beginning for the early modern vegetarian author Thomas Tryon. Tryon’s prolific literary output of tracts and guidebooks (complete with hundreds of recipes) advocating meat-free living treats texture as one of the most important properties of food for the thoughtful consumer to consider.

Not just a matter of taste, food texture mattered, according to Tryon, throughout the entire digestive process. Sounding more or less like a twenty-first century juice cleanser, Tryon obsesses over what he calls the “furring” of the body’s “passageways.”[1] His vegetarianism, though in part ethically-motivated, also arose from his revulsion at the image of internal organs coated by “the Fat of Flesh or Fish” in sticky “oyly bodies,” such that they become hairy with strands of partly digested matter that, in turn, coalesce into “crudities” (incompletely-digested lumps of food) and other “obstructions.”[2] He devoted his life to popularizing a diet designed to promote wellness by textually transforming the internal surfaces of the organs, making them smooth, sleek, and uniform of consistency, thereby bringing the body into a state of peace and harmony from the inside out.

The fantasy that consuming certain foods will purify the finicky, smelly mass of cavities and tubes that make up the human digestive system is persistent in dietary literature from the ancient world to the present day. Plutarch urged his readers to “eat cautiously of such food as is solid and most nourishing” in favor of “those things which are thin and light,” being particularly sparing in the consumption of flesh which “very much clogs us and leaves ill relics behind it.”[3] The Yogi-brand “Roasted Dandelion Spice DeTox” tea I’m drinking as I write this promises to cleanse my liver and make my skin even and smooth. For Tryon, this dream of textureless organs was becoming more possible than ever thanks to an influx of the early modern equivalent of superfoods: the fruits, vegetables, and roots of the Caribbean.

Tryon’s eager account of these new imports, “A Brief Treatise of the Principal Fruits and Herbs that Grow in Barbadoes, Jamaica, and other Plantations in the West-Indies”—the first portion of his three-volume collection Friendly Advice to the Gentlemen-Planters of the East and West Indies (1684)—is an interesting case study in the history of thought on food texture because of how significant this factor was to the arguments Tryon made for consuming this new fare. The most beneficial textural properties of Caribbean produce, he argued, could be found at the microscopic level. The “delicate cooling Breezes and refreshing Gales of Wind,” combined with the “Sun’s more near and direct Beams,” infused the vegetation with an invisible motion that  “digest[ed] their Rawness.”[4] While the bulk of Tryon’s writing encouraged his readers to subsist primarily on a relatively flavorless diet of plain gruel and bread, he was ecstatic about tropical fruits and vegetables because of his belief that climate conditions had pre-digested them into an internal state of refined homogeneity.

The pineapple’s visible “delicacy” and “curious Shape” is, according to Tryon’s treatise, complemented by its ability, when consumed, to “moderate, cool, comfort and refresh the Spirits, cleanse the Passages, remove Obstructions that fur the Pipes, and also purge away and help to digest all slimy and sharp Juices that offend Nature.”[5] Plaintains’ inner “brisk spiritous parts”  will “gently open obstructions”;[6] the “Cocoe-Nut’s” “think or milky Substance” contains “pure fine brisk Spirits” that “breeds good Blood”;[7] underneath the seemingly forbidding appearance of “pinpillow-pears” (apparently a type of prickly pear) with their “Martial Weapons or Prickles” run “Juices quick and penetrating” that “cut Phlegm … and help Concoction.”[8] In short, the foods of the West Indies promise dramatic advances in the study of the fluid mechanics of the body that so interests Tryon.

The motivations shaping Tryon’s particular vision of an idealized digestive system—clean, free of conflict, and so smooth that nothing offensive can stick to it—though theoretically a simple matter of health, becomes more sociopolitically complex when considered in the context of the subsequent two sections that follow the “Brief Treatise” in the Friendly Advice to the Gentleman-Planters volume. The subsequent texts, “The Complaints of the Negro-Slaves against the Hard Usages and Barbarous Cruelties Inflicted Upon Them” and “A Discourse in Way of Dialogue, between an Ethiopean or Negro-Slave, and a Christian that was his Master in America,” delineate the cruel, dehumanizing conditions and racist atrocities that bring the very health foods Tryon promotes to English tables.[9] Like Whole Foods’s infamous 2014 campaign featuring posters of a smiling child that read “Grow Up Strong and Harmless,” or the bizarrely-titled beverage “Harmless Harvest Coconut Water,” Tryon’s desire for a textureless and therefore harmonious and virtuous inner state reads like a case of protesting too much: displacing anxiety over one’s involvement in violent and destructive global food infrastructures by becoming a metaphorical embodiment of harmlessness through achieving conflict-free digestion.

[1] Thomas Tryon, Monthly Observations for the Preserving of Health with a Long and Comfortable Life, in this our Pilgrimage on Earth, but more particularly for the spring and summer seasons (London, 1688), 14.

[2] Ibid, 14-15.

[3] Plutarch, Plutarch’s Morals, Vol. 1, ed. William W. Goodwin (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1871), 268.

[4] Tryon, A Brief Treatise of the Principal Fruits and Herbs that Grow in Barbadoes, Jamaica, and other Plantations in the West-Indies (1684), 2-3.

[5] Ibid, 4-7.

[6] Ibid, 9.

[7] Ibid, 13.

[8] Ibid, 37.

[9] Kim F. Hall offers a trenchant analysis of these treatises in the context of the xenophobia expressed in Tryon’s writings in‘Extravagant Viciousness’: Slavery and Gluttony in the Works of Thomas Tryon,” in Writing Race across the Atlantic World: Medieval to Modern, eds. Phillip Beidler and Gary Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 93-111.

Andrea Crow is an assistant professor in the English department at Boston College where she specializes in early modern poetry and drama. She is currently completing a monograph exploring the relationship between poetics and food scarcity in seventeenth-century Anglophone literature. Her work has appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Christianity and Literature, and Early Modern Women.