São Miguel's hothouse pineapple steeped in aguardente, the liqueur of the last pinery in Europe
Origin: São Miguel, Azores, Portugal
From the journey of Pineapple.
The Azores hold the strangest survival in the whole history of this fruit. The heated glasshouse pineapple, the ruinous aristocratic folly of eighteenth-century England and the Netherlands, died out everywhere as steamships and then canneries made tropical fruit cheap. It died out everywhere except on one island, where it turned into an industry and is still running. São Miguel grew oranges for the British market until blight destroyed the trade in the 1860s, leaving the island with a great many empty glasshouses and no crop. Growers turned to pineapple, and the estufas of Fajã de Baixo and Ponta Delgada have produced it ever since. The method is closer to gardening than to agriculture and has barely changed: plants are raised from crowns in one house and moved to another, the glass is whitewashed by hand to control the light, and the houses are filled with the smoke of green wood and straw for a few days to force every plant to flower at the same time, which is a technique found essentially nowhere else. The fruit takes between eighteen months and two years, against twelve in the tropics, and comes out small, dense, deeply perfumed, and low in acid. Ananás dos Açores has held a European protected designation of origin since 1996. The liqueur is what the island does with it after the fresh fruit has been eaten. Ripe pineapple is steeped in aguardente, the local grape spirit, for several weeks, then sweetened with syrup and rested until the harshness has gone. Every household on São Miguel has a version, and the shops sell a dozen commercial ones. It is poured cold in very small glasses after a meal, alongside the island's other homemade liqueurs of passion fruit, fennel, and milk. The patience is the whole method. A liqueur drunk at three weeks is raw and sharp; the same liqueur at three months is round and smells of the glasshouse.
The liqueur keeps indefinitely and improves for the first year. Store it away from light; the colour fades in a sunny kitchen although the flavour does not. The strained pineapple is not waste. Drain it well and use it in a cake batter or over ice cream, or reduce it with a little of its own liqueur to a spoonable compote for the Azorean cheeses. If Ananás dos Açores cannot be found, choose the smallest and most fragrant pineapple available and let it stand at room temperature until it gives at the base and smells strongly at the stem end. A Queen Victoria pineapple is closer in character than a Smooth Cayenne, which is the large acidic type bred for canning. The same method with the same spirit gives the island's other household liqueurs: passion fruit, fennel seed, and leite, the curious milk liqueur of the Azores, which is made by curdling milk into the spirit and straining it clear.
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