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Pineappple Upside Down Cake
1 can pineapple 2 level T butter 1½ C brown sugar Drain pineapple of liquid. Melt butter in warm frying-pan, add the sugar, stir, and add pineapple. Let simmer about one-half hour. 3 eggs Beat 20 1½ C white sugar min.
J 1½ C flour 1½ t baking powder 1/2 C water or pineapple juice Pour cake batter over pineapple and sugar in spider and bake in oven until well done. Turn over on large platter, bottom side up. Serve with whipped cream or plain.
Mrs. Ed. Quinten.
A skillet sponge cake from the era when canned pineapple was still a novelty worth building a dessert around. The recipe assumes you know how a cast-iron pan behaves and gives no temperature, no time, and no pan size.
- The spider is the frying panA spider was originally a long-legged cast-iron skillet for hearth cooking; by this book's date the word simply meant a heavy frying pan. Make the caramel and bake the cake in the same 9- or 10-inch cast-iron skillet, which is what the instruction to "pour cake batter over pineapple and sugar in spider" assumes.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A sponge batter of this depth wants a moderate oven, 350F, for roughly 35 to 45 minutes, until the top springs back and a skewer comes out clean.
- The half-hour simmerThirty minutes of butter, brown sugar and pineapple over heat is a long time by modern standards and will drive off most of the fruit's moisture and darken the sugar considerably. Watch it rather than timing it: you want a thick, bubbling caramel, not a scorched one. Ten to fifteen minutes over moderate heat usually gets there.
- Beat 20 minutesThe bracket in the original is placed among the batter ingredients and its span is unclear; the most likely reading is that the eggs and white sugar are whipped to a thick pale foam, which along with the baking powder lifts the cake. Twenty minutes was a hand-whisk figure; a stand mixer on high does the same job in five to eight minutes, when the mixture falls from the beater in a ribbon that holds its shape briefly.
- The batter has no fatEggs, sugar, flour, baking powder and liquid make a lean sponge-type batter rather than a butter cake; the recipe does not say whether the liquid is hot. Fold the flour and baking powder in by hand so the air you just beat in survives, and add the water or juice last.
- Missing seasoningsThere is no salt and no vanilla, which is not unusual in receipts of this kind. A quarter teaspoon of salt sifted with the flour improves it without changing the character.
- The canThe recipe does not say what form the pineapple takes; sliced rings in syrup are the usual assumption for a cake like this, and a No. 2 can (about 2½ cups of contents, rather less once drained) is the likely size. Modern 20-ounce cans of rings are the closest equivalent; reserve the drained juice for the half cup of liquid in the batter.
- UnmoldingTurn it out onto the platter within two or three minutes of leaving the oven. Let the caramel cool in the pan and it sets hard, taking the fruit with it.
- YieldA 9- or 10-inch skillet cake serves eight to ten.
Upside-down cakes long predate canned fruit: cooks had been caramelizing sugar and butter in a skillet, laying apples or berries over it and baking a batter on top since the hearth era. What changed in the early twentieth century was the pineapple. Hawaiian canneries made sliced pineapple in syrup cheap and shelf-stable, and the fruit's tidy rings and bright acidity suited the skillet-caramel method perfectly. The name "pineapple upside-down cake" begins showing up in American print in the 1920s, and a Hawaiian Pineapple Company recipe contest of that decade is generally credited with popularizing it, though the dish was clearly circulating before any single promotion. Its arrival in a church cookbook, contributed under a member's married name, is the usual last step: a manufacturer's novelty becomes a congregation's standard, one submitted card at a time.