England's 18th-century obsession set in cream: the juice and zest of a fresh pineapple folded into lemon-curdled double cream, poured into crystal glasses and chilled until trembling: the dessert that aristocratic England served to prove it could afford the world's most expensive fruit
Origin: England
From the journey of Pineapple.
When Columbus returned from the Caribbean in 1493 with a pineapple aboard, he presented it to the Spanish king as the most extraordinary fruit from the New World. Within fifty years, the pineapple had become the most coveted fruit in Europe; but virtually impossible to grow in northern European climates without heated glasshouses. By the 18th century, the English aristocracy had developed an obsessive relationship with the pineapple: dedicated heated 'pineapple pits' (early greenhouses with underground furnaces) were built on country estates to grow them, at a cost equivalent to building a small house. The Earl of Dunmore commissioned a magnificent stone folly in the shape of a pineapple on his Scottish estate in 1761. A single English-grown pineapple could cost the equivalent of £6,000–£8,000 in modern terms; imported ones, even at £500–£1,000 equivalent, were affordable only to the wealthy. Hosts who could not afford to eat a pineapple would rent one for the evening from a confectioner, displaying it on the dining table as a symbol of wealth, then returning it uneaten. The pineapple posset, pineapple juice curdled into double cream with lemon, was the English kitchen's answer to the question of what to do when you actually had a pineapple: a preparation that extends the fruit's luxury into a dessert for many guests, silky, cold, and intensely fragrant with pineapple.
The posset is one of England's oldest dessert forms; originally a hot drink of curdled milk or cream with wine and spices, dating from at least the 14th century (it appears in medieval manuscripts and is mentioned in Macbeth: 'the posset / Wherewith I drugg'd their possets'). By the 18th century it had evolved into a cold set dessert made with cream and citrus juice: the acid sets the boiled cream into a silky, spoonable consistency. The pineapple posset is the grandest version: using the most expensive fruit available to produce a dessert that showcases both the cook's access to luxury ingredients and the kitchen's technical skill. Several 18th-century English cookbooks, including Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery (1747) and Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), include pineapple cream and pineapple posset preparations.
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