The British steakhouse plate: a griddled gammon steak under a caramelised pineapple ring, with chips and a fried egg
Origin: Britain
From the journey of Pineapple.
Gammon and pineapple is what happened when the most expensive fruit in eighteenth-century England came back a century and a half later in a tin costing a few pence. It is the plainest possible illustration of what canning did, and it is worth pausing on the reversal: the same fruit that an earl once hired for an evening and returned uneaten was, by 1965, the thing that came free with a gammon steak in a Bristol steakhouse. The pairing itself is not new. British cooking has put sweet fruit against salt cured pork for centuries, in apple sauce, in ham with apricots, in the clove-and-brown-sugar glaze on a baked ham. What was new was the pineapple ring, which arrived through the Hawaiian canneries, reached British kitchens in quantity between the wars, and became ubiquitous after rationing ended in 1954. The Berni Inn chain, founded in Bristol in 1955 and at its peak running several hundred restaurants, put gammon with a pineapple ring on the menu alongside prawn cocktail and Black Forest gateau, and between them those three dishes defined what eating out meant to a generation of British families who had never done it before. It then went the way of all such things. By the 1990s it was shorthand for everything provincial and dated about British catering. It never actually left the pub menu, and it has lately been treated with more respect, partly because the combination is genuinely sound: gammon is salty and fatty, pineapple is sweet and sharply acidic, and the acid cuts the fat in exactly the way a sauce would have to be constructed to do. The full plate is specific and worth assembling properly: gammon, pineapple ring, chips, garden peas, and a fried egg, the egg being the point at which the dish stops apologising for itself.
Tinned rings are the traditional and, for once, the technically better choice. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests protein and will make the surface of the gammon mushy if the two sit together; the canning process destroys the enzyme. If using fresh, cut rings 1 cm thick and caramelise them hard, which does the same job. The fried egg is not universal but is the standard pub presentation and is what most British people picture. Some versions add a grilled tomato and a few mushrooms, which is the full Berni Inn plate. A parsley sauce or a mustard sauce is the older, pre-pineapple accompaniment to a gammon steak and remains excellent. For a Christmas variant, use the same demerara-and-mustard glaze on a whole baked gammon joint, studding it with cloves and pressing pineapple rings onto the scored fat with cocktail sticks for the final twenty minutes.
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