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Pineapple Upside Down Cake
1 C brown sugar 8 T pineapple juice ¼ lb. butter 1/4 t vanilla 1 large can pineapple 1⅛ C flour 3 eggs 1 t baking powder 1 C white sugar Melt brown sugar and butter in iron skillet, put in slices of pineapple. Beat yolks of eggs, add sugar, pineapple juice and vanilla. and sift flour and baking powder, add to egg mixture and beat. Fold in egg whites. Bake 350 degrees. Serve with whipped cream. Mix Mrs. C. Klepper. 14 C butter
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe: the typesetting has lost several fraction bars, and no pan size or baking time is given. Both are easy to supply, but read the ingredient list carefully before you start.
- The mangled fractions"14 lb. butter" and "14 C butter" are almost certainly 1/4 lb (1 stick, 4 oz) and 1/4 cup, the fraction bars having dropped out in printing. The 1/4 lb goes into the skillet with the brown sugar; the 1/4 cup belongs in the batter, which otherwise has no fat at all.
- Pan and quantityA cast-iron skillet of about 10 inches suits this amount of batter. A "large can" of sliced pineapple in this period was probably something on the order of a No. 2 1/2 can, about 29 oz, which yields more rings than a single layer needs, plus the half cup of juice (8 T) the recipe calls for.
- Baking timeNone is given. At 350F a cake this size runs 35 to 45 minutes, until the centre springs back and a tester comes out clean. The topping will be bubbling up the sides well before the crumb is set, so judge by the cake, not the caramel.
- Order of workThe instructions read as a single run-on. Melt sugar and butter, lay in the pineapple, and set the skillet aside off the heat while you mix; the sugar should not be cooking away while the eggs are beaten. Pour the batter over the fruit and go straight into the oven.
- The egg whites are the leaveningOne teaspoon of baking powder in this quantity of flour is modest, so the whites carry much of the rise. Beat them to soft, not stiff, peaks and fold in three additions, cutting through rather than stirring.
- Turning outRest the skillet 3 to 5 minutes, no longer, then invert onto a plate. Left to cool, the caramel sets and the fruit stays glued to the iron.
- YieldEight to ten servings from a 10-inch skillet. Best the day it is made, while the topping is still glossy.
Pineapple upside-down cake is the signature of canned pineapple, which the Hawaiian packing industry pushed hard from the 1910s onward; a widely circulated Hawaiian Pineapple Company recipe contest in the mid-1920s is generally credited with fixing the dish in American home baking. The technique itself is older than the fruit: cakes baked over caramelised sugar and fruit, sometimes called "skillet upside-down cake," long predate the canned ring. What marks this version as a congregational cookbook entry is the cast-iron skillet, taken for granted rather than specified by size, and the assumption that any cook reading it already knew when a cake was done.