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Pineapple Puffs
1/3 C butter. 1 C sugar. 2 eggs. 1 3/4 C pastry flour. 2 t baking powder 14 t salt 1/2 C crushed pineapple Cream butter, add sugar gradually and cream. Add beaten eggs. Sift together flour, baking powder and salt and add alternately with the pineapple to the creamed mixture. Pour into greased and floured muffin pans. Bake 25 to 30 minutes. Serve sprinkled with powdered sugar or with hot pudding sauce.
Alice Motzer.
A plain creamed-butter cake batter baked in muffin tins, from the sort of church-supper collection where contributors assumed everyone already knew the proportions. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so treat this as a method rather than a formula.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the baking powder, salt and pineapple survive in the printed list; the butter, sugar, eggs and flour have dropped out. A standard cup-cake ratio of the period fits the leavening given: 1/4 cup butter, 3/4 cup sugar, 2 eggs and 1 1/2 cups flour. That is a reconstruction, not what the book says.
- Reading the abbreviations"t" is teaspoon and "C" is cup. "14 t salt" is an optical misreading of 1/4 t; no puff batter takes fourteen teaspoons of salt.
- No oven temperature is givenThe recipe simply says "Bake 25 to 30 minutes." A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a batter of this type and fits that timing in a standard 12-cup muffin tin, but the figure is inference, not the book's instruction.
- Drain the pineappleDrain the half cup well, pressing lightly, or the batter slackens and the puffs bake dense and gummy at the centre. Modern canned crushed pineapple is generally wet enough to need this.
- Alternating the additionsAdd the flour mixture and the pineapple in three and two parts, beginning and ending with flour, and stir only until the last streaks disappear. Once the wet and dry are combined the baking powder begins working, so get the pans filled and into the oven without delay.
- Muffin pansThe recipe calls for greased and floured pans rather than paper liners. Fill the cups two-thirds full.
- Yield and servingAbout 12 puffs on the reconstructed quantities. Powdered sugar is the everyday finish; "hot pudding sauce" is not defined here, but in books of this kind it usually means a simple sweet sauce thickened on the stove and poured over at the table.
Community cookbooks compiled by church societies were fundraising documents first and reference books second, and their gaps show it: what reaches the printed page is not always what a contributor wrote down. Here the printed list begins mid-stream ("2 t baking powder 14 t salt"), which points to a truncated or damaged transcription rather than to a contributor leaving out the basics. The dish itself belongs to the long American run of small steamed and baked puddings served with a hot sauce, updated here by canned crushed pineapple. Hawaiian pineapple canning expanded enormously in the first decades of the twentieth century, and by the time books like this were assembled a tin of it was an ordinary pantry item rather than a luxury, which is why it turns up in a simple cake batter without comment or explanation.