Fran Beauman
THE PINEAPPLE
King of Fruits
336pp. Chatto and Wimdus. £16.99.
0 7011 7699 7
In his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, John Locke asserts the impossibility of knowing the taste of pineapple before you have actually tasted it. This is not just a throwaway remark; he returns to the point in several drafts and in several places. In 1671, Locke wrote that the man who has never had pineapple, that “delicate” fruit, “in his mouth” cannot have a true or “new” idea of it. He can only have an amalgam of “old” ideas based on the descriptions of travellers. Later, he wrote that “we see nobody gets the relish of a pineapple, till he goes to the Indies, where it is, and tastes it”. To think that you could relish a pineapple without really experiencing it was like imagining you could see colours in the dark. The person who “from his childhood, never tasted an oyster, or a pineapple” does not know the particular taste of these things. And again: “let him try if any words can give him the taste of the Pine-Apple, and make him have the true idea of the Relish of that celebrated delicious Fruit”. For Locke, who had never tasted a pineapple himself, this was impossible. Only first-hand sensory experience could give knowledge of the taste – the quiddity – of pineapple.
Locke’s choice of the pineapple to make his point was not random. In a sense, the structure of his argument would have worked just as well had he chosen apples instead of pineapples. But who in England in the 1670s was not acquainted with the particular “relish” of an apple? The pineapple, by contrast, was the ultimate in inaccessible luxury fruit. Unless you were close to royalty, or a traveller to the West Indies, you were very unlikely to have been anywhere near one. Moreover, those who had tasted its yellow flesh, described it as peculiarly complex and elusive. Richard Ligon, in a history of the Caribbean, claimed that “nothing of rare taste can be thought on that is not there”. Some thought it musky. Others thought it combined all that is “most delicate in the Peach, the Strawberry, the Muscadine Grape and the Pippin”. John Evelyn, the courtier and salad expert, disagreed. When he tasted chunks of pineapple cut up by the King himself in 1668, he felt the flavour fell short of the “ravishing” descriptions he had read, having a “grateful acidity” but tasting more of “the Quince and the Melon” than anything more delicious. This illustrates Locke’s argument. The earliest European tasters of pineapple could only describe it by reference to other fruits. They could not summon up its full flavour either in words, or in the mouths of others.
The taste of pineapple, however, is only a part of its charm, as Fran Beauman’s engaging “biography” of the fruit amply shows (for once, the application of “biography” to an inanimate object seems justified). As soon as they saw it, men were wowed by the pineapple’s looks, its mathematically perfect golden shell and its
outrageous green spikes. In 1535 the Spanish writer Oviedo confessed, “I do not suppose there is in the whole world any other [fruit] of so exquisite and lovely appearance”. In 1702, a Portuguese Franciscan compared the skin of the pineapple to a “brocade of pinecones” and the green top to a “royal crown”. The appearance of the pineapple, so bizarre it seemed to many observers as if it was artificial, would in turn inspire human artifice and architecture, notably the wonderfully absurd jutting stone pineapple at Dunmore Park in Stirlingshire, constructed some time after 1761, which this splendidly illustrated book contains a photograph of. From Georgian times onwards, there were pineapple gateposts and pineapple follies; pineapple mirrors and pineapple beds. Wedgwood made pineappleware, cream-coloured earthenware, knobbly like the body of a pineapple and glazed in green and
yellow.
Meanwhile, the pineapple itself began to be used as an ornament at the dinner table. Especially prized were English pineapples, grown with absurd labours in a hothouse “pinery”, an accessory to a country estate which, says Beauman, “every self-respecting aristocrat” aspired to possess. Beauman calculates that once all the costs of a pinery are considered – a stock of costly pineapple plants and pots and a glasshouse to contain them, a 40-foot stove to heat the glasshouse, a garden boy to tend the stove full-time – the expense of a single English-raised pineapple in the second half of the eighteenth century was about £80, or £5,000 in today’s money. No wonder a single pineapple was often “made to last for some time, passed on from party to party until it began to rot so much it smelt out the whole household”. By Victorian times, one horticulturalist claimed he had heard of a “single pineapple going the round of west-end dinner parties for some weeks”. Beauman does not mention a similar assertion which I have come across
elsewhere, that poorer middle-class families would even take to hiring pineapples for occasions when they wished to entertain, in order to appear grand, praying that no one would actually attempt to cut a slice.
By this time, however, the pineapple was far less aristocratic than it had been. In the 1850s, costermongers sold pineapple by the piece – “a taste of paradise for just a penny a slice”. After it began to be canned on a large scale in the 1880s, pineapple became less grand still. “Decapitated, flayed and hacked to pieces”, writes Beauman, a little melodramatically, adding that “having been so unceremoniously stripped of so many of its most desirable attributes in order to fit into cans, the pineapple was also stripped of an element of its identity”. This is in some ways a Tocquevillean book, regretting the decline in mystery that came with the mass production of pineapple, while at the same time recognizing the democratic benefits of commerce.
The compelling final chapter tells a story which deserves to be better known. Since the 1990s, sales of fresh pineapple have increased rapidly. This is partly because of the growth of pre-packed chilled pineapple chunks, but more significantly because of the introduction of a new hybrid of the fruit, known as “the Gold”. From the 1880s until the 1970s the dominant variety of pineapple was the Smooth Cayenne, which suffered from a greenish skin (even when ripe), a fibrous flesh and vicious spikes. In the 1970s, scientists developed a new strain known as 73-114, which had numerous benefits. These new sweeter pineapples always looked yellow when ripe, which was less confusing for consumers, and contained four times as much Vitamin C as the Smooth Cayenne. After numerous wrangles over patents with rival fruit producers, in 1996 Del Monte launched a version of this strain under the name of “Del Monte gold”. “Within months the Del Monte gold became the world’s best-selling variety of fresh pineapple with an 80 per cent share of the market, even though it is almost invariably more expensive than the Smooth Cayenne. At the same time it gave an astonishing boost to pineapple sales in general: in both Britain and the United States, consumption of fresh pineapple has more than doubled since its introduction – on average, two to three pineapples are now consumed per person per year.” Gold pineapples are now grown by other producers than Del Monte, including Fairtrade farmers in Costa Rica.
Fran Beauman’s conclusion is that, while pineapples have lost their seventeenth-century exoticism and their eighteenth-century majesty, they actually taste better now than ever before. It is impossible to read this scintillating monograph without feeling what luck it is to be alive in a time when both the form and taste of pineapple are neither as inaccessible nor as unimaginable as they were for John Locke.
