When pine-apples are picked and eaten fresh in their own climate, they seem to dissolve in the mouth, and the fibrous texture is hardly perceived. Not so at our tables. Here I have sometimes partly resolved that they are not much of a luxury after all, especially when the slices are so tough as to require the knife and fork. They are better cut into dice, saturated with sugar, and piled in the centre of a glass dish, with a row à la Charlotte of sponge-cake slices, or of ladies’-fingers around the sides.
BEVERAGES.
Punch (Mrs. Williams).
Rub loaf-sugar over the peels of six lemons to break the little vessels and absorb the ambrosial oil of the lemons. Then squeeze out all the juice possible from six oranges and six lemons, removing the seeds; add to it five pounds of loaf-sugar (including the sugar rubbed over the peels) and two quarts of water, with five cloves and two blades of mace (in a bag); simmer this over the stove about ten minutes, making a sirup.
This sirup will keep forever. It should be bottled and kept to sweeten the liquors, whenever punch is to be made.
Mix then one pint of green tea, a scant pint of brandy, one quart of Jamaica rum, one quart of Champagne, and one tea-cupful of Chartreuse. When well mixed, sweeten it to taste with the sirup; pour it into the punch-bowl, in which is placed an eight or ten pound piece of ice. Slice three oranges and three lemons, removing the seeds, which put also into the punch-bowl.
Milk Punch (Mrs. Filley).
Ingredients: Four quarts of Jamaica rum, three quarts of water, five pints of boiling milk, three pounds of loaf-sugar, twenty-four lemons, two nutmegs.