Pineapple Juice and the Cannery

Oʻahu and the plantation islands of Hawaiʻi

Origin

Pineapple, Ananas comosus, is a post-contact fruit in Hawaiʻi, and its juice belongs to the twentieth century and to the cannery. James Dole and the Hawaiian Pineapple Company of 1901 began the industry that turned the fruit into a canned and bottled commodity, with the plantation labour of the Japanese, Filipino, Portuguese and other workers behind it. Kysar records how the pineapple companies and the hotels, and later the advertising of the 1950s and 1960s, branded anything with pineapple as Hawaiian, a habit whose effects are still felt; the juice that reached the local table, in punches, iced teas and marinades, is the plainer inheritance of the same industry.

Description

Pineapple juice is the pressed liquid of the ripe fruit, tart and sweet with a sharp acidity, sold fresh-pressed, canned or bottled. In the local kitchen it is less a drink on its own than an ingredient: the base of fruit punch, one of the sweet-sour components of plantation iced tea, and the acid in marinades, as in the Korean-Hawaiian kalbi where it is added to the sweet shoyu mixture. The fruit also carries bromelain, an enzyme that softens protein, which is why the juice is used in short marinades and why raw juice behaves differently from canned, which has been heated.

III

The Thread

—Both treat pineapple juice as a plain everyday drink of a fruit-growing, sugar-growing island, served cold and often mixed with other juices. The Puerto Rican juice stands as a drink of its own, while the Hawaiian juice is shaped by the cannery and used chiefly as a component of punches and marinades. Puerto · Rican

—Korean galbi is traditionally tenderised and sweetened with grated Asian pear, and the Hawaiian kalbi turns to pineapple juice for the same work on the short rib. The principle is a fruit enzyme and sugar acting on the meat; the difference is the fruit, a local substitution made at the plantation table. Korean

—Tepache is a Mexican drink made from pineapple rind and flesh steeped with sugar and allowed to ferment lightly. It shares with the Hawaiian juice the use of the whole fruit as a refreshing drink, but it is fermented and brewed at home, where the Hawaiian juice is pressed or canned and left unfermented. Mexican

Flavour Context

Pineapple juice is drunk cold, with the rice-based plate lunch and the fried and grilled dishes of the local table, and it is mixed with lilikoʻi, orange and guava in the punches of the islands. Its acidity cuts the fat of pork, short rib and fried food, and its sugar balances the salt of shoyu, which is the structural reason it sits so naturally in marinades and plantation iced tea alongside them.

V · Quality Hierarchy

Juice pressed from fully ripe, locally grown fruit and served within hours, cold and unheated,… Juice pressed from good ripe fruit and kept chilled for a day or two, perhaps…

VI · Sensory Tests

smell: Fresh juice smells sweet and sharply fragrant, with a clean fruit note at the top. Good fruit shows this…

VII · Where the dish lives or dies

The pivot is the time the meat spends in raw pineapple juice. A short marinade of a few hours, in a cool place, softens the…

Pillars V — VII

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