Canning the Pineapple

Having inspected the enormous crockery filled with human body parts, after alighting on the lush, volcanic island of Guadaloupe in November of 1493, Columbus and his men spotted, then tasted, what must have seemed to their eyes an utterly fabulous object: a giant and grotesque fruit whose exterior was segmented like a pine cone but whose interior was rather apple-like, at least to the limited European taste of the time.

A new "biography" of the pine-apple by Fran Beauman, reviewed recently in the Times of London, reminds us again just how extraordinary this now rather common fruit actually is.

So unique was the first succulent bite that John Locke, in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” asserted the impossibility of knowing the “Relish” (and Platonic Idea) of the fruit before actually trying it empirically. Of course in the 1670s, the Pine-Apple was the “ultimate in inaccessible luxury fruit.” Once one got past its rebarbative exterior, with its "outrageous green spikes" that made it something of the rhinocerous of fruits, and exposed its brilliant yellow (and at that time greenish) meat, one could experience a terrific explosion of complex flavours, from "the most delicate in the Peach, the Strawberry, the Muscadine Grape and the Pippin” to "the Quince and the Melon."

It should come as no suprise therefore that the pineapple, that sacred monster of fruits, became a symbol of status amongst, for example, the English aristocracy:

Meanwhile, the pineapple itself began to be used as an ornament at the dinner table. Especially prized were English pineapples, grown with absurd labours in a hothouse “pinery”, an accessory to a country estate which, says Beauman, “every self-respecting aristocrat” aspired to possess. Beauman calculates that once all the costs of a pinery are considered – a stock of costly pineapple plants and pots and a glasshouse to contain them, a 40-foot stove to heat the glasshouse, a garden boy to tend the stove full-time – the expense of a single English-raised pineapple in the second half of the eighteenth century was about £80, or £5,000 in today’s money.

As the reviewer puts it, this is a "Tocquevillean book, regretting the decline in mystery that came with the mass production of pineapple, while at the same time recognizing the democratic benefits of commerce. " In Victorian times, the reviewer explains rather sniffily, the aspiring middle-class might have gone so far as to acquire pineapples for hire, often overripe from extended abuse, for special occasions "in order to appear grand, praying that no one would actually attempt to cut a slice."

By the 1850s, "costermongers sold pineapple by the piece – 'a taste of paradise for just a penny a slice.'" Canning and mass availability came soon after. And today, we hardly give this noble, primitive delicious fruit a second's thought.