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Take It or Leave It

Grilled Pineapple with Chilli Syrup and Coconut Ice Cream

*Roast pineapple with tipsy

cake has been on the menu

since Dinner opened. The

‘tipsy cake’ is a light, almost

milky, brioche and is

sensationally good.

It is a take it or leave it sort of fruit, the pineapple. To some

it is almost as repulsive as a durian or a Swedish rotten

herring. I marvel at it. I eye them up carefully in the shop,

looking for them to lose that greenness in the skin and for

the leaves to look a tiny bit tired. Like melons, I turn them

over and smell the bases, waiting until the aroma becomes

quite strong. I have the same sort of awed respect for the

pineapple as the eighteenth-century landowners who built

greenhouses for their propagation and installed stone

pineapples on their walls and parapets as a status symbol

for the envy of their neighbours.

This architectural respect for the pineapple even

tended to dominate gastronomic approaches to the fruit.

Many preparations involved scooping out the pineapple

flesh and serving a mousse or sorbet inside the shell. That

and the ubiquitous Ananas Condé – slices of pineapple

macerated in kirsch and served with creamed rice – were

about all classical cooking had to say about the pineapple

until recently. It may be thought that was quite enough

already and that the fruit, properly peeled and thinly

sliced, needed no embellishment whatsoever. Nor does it,

but nor does a little bit of heat do it any harm.

I believe it was Marc Meneau at the three-star

L’Esperance – still, sadly, on my unvisited list – who took it

upon himself to roast a whole pineapple and flavour it with

vanilla. I also believe Marco Pierre White produced a

version of that dish when he presided over the Oak Room

in Piccadilly. The pineapple arrived standing on a dais on a

trolley, with spikes of vanilla protruding from the eyeholes

in its skin and, as I recall, the whole fruit set aflame with

rum. I hear that Heston Blumenthal has adopted the theme

and intends to roast his pineapple on a clockwork spit in

the dining room: I shall observe with interest.*

I am all in favour of making things hot for the

pineapple, and in more ways than one. I discovered

that grilling a pineapple concentrates the flavour and

smokiness induced by the chargrill only encourages the

fruit. I believe that there was a chilli performing a largely

decorative function in Marco’s roast pineapple dish and

I – without any great originality – decided that the chilli

should start taking a more active role. The smoky flavour,

a quite serious degree of chilli heat and the concentrated

sweetness of the fruit make for a heady marriage.

73

February