Retro Food For Modern Times: The Busy Woman’s Pineapple Soufflé

All eras have their food fads – remember when everything was daubed in pesto? And/ or sun-dried tomatoes?  What about Tandoori chicken served ad nauseam outside of its natural habitat of an Indian restaurant? Tandoori Chicken Caesar Salad, Tandoori Chicken Pizza, Tandoori Chicken Pie, Tandoori Chicken Pasta with Sun Dried Tomatoes and Pesto…for the love of God, stop.  Just because something tastes good doesn’t mean it has to be used in every known recipe in the world.

Back in the 1970’s pineapple was the weapon of choice.  It was everywhere!  It was stabbed on toothpicks with a cube of generic cheese  and possibly a brightly coloured cocktail onion to form the signature hors d’oeuvre of the decade, it was grilled with ham steaks to provide the first course of the generation and, combined with the glacé cherry, formed the classic upside down cake.

It was also:

Made into Salads:

Used as a receptable for prawns:

In increasingly odd ways (also note the ubiquitous curly parsley):

For main course, there was the exotic appeal of a sweet and sour:

Or a  pineapple and pork casserole:

For dessert, apart from the classic upside down cake, pineapple was also a favourite topping for cheesecakes:

Or, as in the case of this post, made into a  pineapple soufflé. The recipe for pineapple soufflé appears in a number of cookbooks of this vintage so must have been a popular dish of the time.  Also, just to be really confusing,  this is not a soufflé as in the French baked dessert but is more a mousse type concoction.  I have no idea why this is also called a soufflé.  Maybe in the ’70’s “foreign” terms were interchangeable. I guess we should consider ourselves lucky it’s not called Pineapple Bourguignon…

This recipe is so easy to cook and goes a mad, almost flourescent yellow when you first mix the jelly and cream together:

The end result is lovely.  The tanginess of the lemon and the pineapple cut through the heaviness of the cream so you don’t get that horrible creamy coating on your tongue.  It is a lovely light and refreshing dessert.  I’ll definitely be making this again and am already thinking about how I could use the same techniques with different fruit and jelly combinations – strawberries with strawberry jelly?  Maybe my favourite rhubarb with raspberry and rosewater jelly…  In the meantime though, just enjoy this as is!