Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [5]
Fragrant and impressive to look at, most pineapples now come from Hawaii. Fifty years ago, the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had a fountain in the lobby that provided fresh pineapple juice.
Pineapples do not continue to ripen after picking. They will keep for some weeks but should not be refrigerated—temperatures below 45 degrees F are not beneficial. A distinctive aroma is one indication of a good pineapple, as well as being heavy for its size. The fruit is sweeter at the bottom, so if it is to be served plain, it should be cut lengthwise.
Pineapple sorbet is hard to rival. In France, you can occasionally find ananas givré, a pineapple hollowed out and filled with the sorbet made from its fruit. Sometimes this is frozen. At any time, it is nearly irresistible. Balzac, who was very fond of pineapple fritters, once planned to get rich by growing pineapples on his property near Paris, but couldn’t afford a greenhouse.
There are a number of recipes for making pineapple sorbet, most of them similar. One is:
PINEAPPLE SORBET
1 fresh pineapple
2 cups sugar
4 cups water
Rum to taste
Dissolve the sugar in the water. Cut the fruit of the pineapple into pieces and add to the sugar and water. Let stand for several hours, then purée in a blender and flavor with rum near the end. Freeze in an ice cream maker according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Serves four.
WOMEN AT TABLE
It was a mere five hundred years or so ago that women, who since antiquity had been largely segregated during meals, began to be widely included at the table. In the early days, advice was available on how they should conduct themselves and be a civilizing influence, as in the Ingenious Gentlewoman’s Delightful Companion, published by an unknown writer in 1653:
“Talk not when you have meat in your mouth, and do not smack like a pig, nor venture to eat spoon-meat so hot that the tears stand in your eyes; which is as unseemly as the gentlewoman who pretended to have as little a stomach as she had a mouth, and therefore would not swallow her peas by spoonsful, but took them one by one, and cut them into two before she could eat them. It is very uncomely to drink so large a draught that your breath is almost gone, and are forced to blow strongly to recover yourself; throwing down your liquor as into a funnel, is an action fitter for a juggler than a gentlewoman …. It will appear very comely and decent to use a fork; so touch no meat without it.”
FORKS
Compared to spoons and knives, used since prehistoric times, forks were latecomers. By the year 100 A.D., they appeared on the tables of royalty in the Middle East, and one hundred years or so later, a Byzantine princess brought a case of them to Venice as part of her trousseau when she married the heir to the doge. Italians of the day were outraged that she should prefer a metallic instrument to the ten fingers God had given her, and when she died soon after her arrival, it was considered divine retribution.
Forks were gradually adopted by the upper classes across Europe over the next five hundred years and were mainly for sticky sweets or food that would stain the fingers. The English considered them effeminate, and it was a long time before they crossed the Channel. An Englishman, Thomas Coryat, claimed to be the first to use one, and he had to go to Europe to do it. In his book Coryat’s Crudities, published in 1611, he writes that “the Italian cannot by any means endure to have his dish touched with fingers, seeing all men’s fingers are not alike cleane.” A fork in the left hand held the food to the plate while the right hand cut it with a knife, and then the fork delivered the food directly to the mouth.
Twenty years later, the fork had immigrated to America, but just barely. Governor Winthrop, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was said to have had the only one on the continent. Ordinary folk were still spearing food with their sharp-tipped knives