Pineapple crush: Fruity salads and easy ice cream
Pineapples. Are they really a product of nature or did someone make them up? “Exotic” fruits are no longer unusual but, apart from rambutans, pineapples must be the oddest-looking — that top knot of leaves, the rough, prickly body, each diamond of skin studded with a tufty “eye”.
To Brits, pineapples represent accessible exotica because for years they came in tins. I’d no idea what a real one looked like when I was a child — pineapple just meant sweet, juicy rounds with a perfect hole in the middle.
My first parties — when I was six, and prepared with the 13-year-old from next door — always had it as their main focus. We threaded cubes of pineapple, tinned ham (Old York variety — we were classy) and cheese on to cocktail sticks, covered a grapefruit in foil and stuck these “canapes” into it.
Along with crustless salmon paste sandwiches and rounds of toasted teacake spread with golden syrup, this was our “party” fare. We’d set it out on the teak coffee table, don our miniskirts, put Martha Reeves and the Vandellas on the record player and issue invitations to our friends and siblings.
The parties that I throw now aren’t nearly as much fun.
As some stage, crushed tinned pineapple arrived, causing great excitement as it meant I could make a “cheesecake” from one of my mum’s cookbooks, based on bashed ginger nut biscuits topped with pineapple and cream cheese.
Then I went off pineapple. It now pains me, because of my ingratitude, that I hoped — when I visited my granny — that there wouldn’t be gammon steak with a pineapple ring and melting cheese on top. I thought it sickly, but those steaks weren’t cheap. Granny regarded them as a treat. She had egg and toast while Grandpa and I had the gammon and pineapple.
Pineapples aren’t on my weekly shopping list, but when I buy one I wonder why I don’t do it more often. Start eating chunks while you’re preparing it and you soon find a third of the flesh has gone. The flavour is big, floral, tropical, almost brassy in its lack of subtlety.
The best have a perfect balance of sweetness and tartness and simultaneously pique and sate thirst.
I’m a fan of Southeast Asian salads made with mangoes, but the prawn salad with pineapple is even better. You could torture me by offering me ripe pineapple with fresh chilli, fish sauce and lime, then whipping it away.
I’m sure my granny — if she were here — would still prefer the gammon option, though.