Bee Wilson reviews The Pineapple: King of fruits by Fran Beauman.
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.
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