The very pineapple of perfection
Presented to kings and depicted in portraits, the pineapple was one of Georgian Britain’s ultimate objets de desir. Matthew Dennison traces its journey to the tin at the back of the cupboard
In Georgian England, nothing was more sought after than the new fruit du jour, pineapple, reveals Matthew Dennison
All such as have eaten of them do commend their sweetness
IN the summer of 1767, it was a source of some surprise to the writer of the Manchester Mercury that Edward Higgins, committed to Carmarthen Castle for burglary, hadn’t included among booty stolen from the home of Mrs Biven of Laugherne any pineapples. Having made himself comfortable in Mrs Biven’s kitchen —to the extent of spreading a cloth on the table and lighting two candles in silver candlesticks before eating a chicken— Higgins ‘got over a Wall into the Garden, and went into the Hot-house, where were many Pine-apples fit to take’. Higgins, however, ‘took only four Cucumbers’.
To the 18th-century reader, his was a curious choice. The pineapple was one of Georgian Britain’s ultimate objets de desir. With good reason, Sheridan’s verbally maladroit Mrs Malaprop, in The Rivals, confuses ‘pineapple’ for ‘pinnacle’ in her commendation of Capt Absolute as ‘the very pineapple of politeness’. To the play’s first audiences, pineapples did, indeed, represent a pinnacle: the costliest, most exotic, most desirable fruit to find its place on Georgian dining tables.
Window displays of pineapples were among the means used by London’s best-known luxury fruit-seller, Owen and Bentley, to dazzle fashionable shoppers and, in 1786, Sophie von la Roche recorded ‘behind the handsome glass windows pyramids of pineapples… We enquired the price of a fine pineapple and did not think it too dear at 6s’. That was the equivalent of a week’s wages for a junior gardener. In Berkeley Square, a short walk from Owen and Bentley, Italian confectioner Dominic Negri was pulling no punches: he called his shop The Pineapple and decorated his tradecards with an image of the coveted fruit. No wonder that when, in 2019, Sotheby’s produced an 18th century-inspired cookbook, The Art of Cooking: A Contemporary Twist on Georgian Fare, the book’s cover illustration featured a gilded pineapple.
A single pineapple survived the homeward journey from Christopher Columbus’s second voyage to the Americas in 1496. Columbus presented it to his patrons, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He preferred the fruit, the King announced, ‘to all others’ and Spanish explorers agreed, according to an English translation of an account of Columbus’s travels published nearly a century later: ‘All such as have eaten of them newly gathered in their native soil, do marvellously commend their sweetness and pleasant taste.’ Ferdinand’s view held sway for more than four centuries, until the availability of canned fruit tarnished the pineapple’s exoticism. The opinion of an 18th-century English gardener that ‘in Deliciousness of Taste and exquisite Flavour’ the pineapple ‘so far exceeds all Fruits’ was one shared by fellow gardeners and garden-owners, cooks, dressmakers, artists and even architects. For a long time, however, for the majority of Europeans, the pineapple’s taste was simply a matter of conjecture. John Parkinson, formerly botanist to Charles I, published a description of the fruit, in his Theatrum Botanicum of 1640, as ‘scaly like an Artichoke at the first view, but more like to a cone of the Pine tree, which we call a pineapple for the forme… being so sweete in smell… tasting… as if Wine, Rosewater and Sugar were mixed together’, but it seems unlikely that he had actually tasted the fruit himself. Only two decades later, in 1661, did Samuel Pepys record seeing a pineapple delivered to Charles II from Barbados. ‘The first that were ever seen in England,’ Pepys explained, had arrived four years before this and were given to Oliver Cromwell. In August 1668, pineapples were on the menu when Charles set out to impress the
French ambassador. It is clear from diarist John Evelyn’s account that, once again, these were imported pineapples and that English gardeners, in the absence of heated glasshouses, had yet to discover a means of growing and ripening the fruit at home. On this occasion, recorded Evelyn, the King gave him a piece of pineapple from his own plate. Evelyn described its taste as resembling that of a quince or melon, with ‘a graceful acidity’. In truth, he was disappointed. He concluded that the pineapple in question was ‘much impaired in coming so far’.
Instead, at the end of the century, an enthusiastic Dutch gardener, Agneta Block,