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Upside Down
4 or 5 apples Place butter and sugar in baking dish or iron skillet and set in oven until butter is melted. Remove from oven and add apples sliced very thin. Sprinkle with cinnamon. Mix following cake batter and pour it over the apples: 14 C butter 1 C sugar 2 eggs (beaten) 1/2 C milk 12 t salt 1½ C flour 2 t baking powder Bake in moderate oven until cake is done about 30 minutes. When cool, turn out with apples on top. Serve with whipped cream.
An upside-down cake in its plainest form: the recipe assumes you know how much butter and sugar to put in the bottom of the pan, and the typed fractions have suffered in transcription. A few readings need settling before you start.
- The garbled fractions"14 C butter" is almost certainly 1/4 cup and "12 t salt" 1/2 teaspoon, the fraction bars having dropped out in transcription. Read that way, the batter is a modest butter cake: 1/4 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, 2 eggs and 1½ cups flour.
- The missing topping quantitiesNo amount is given for the butter and sugar that go in the pan, nor is a pan size specified. For a 9-inch skillet, roughly 4 tablespoons butter and 3/4 cup sugar will cover the bottom; brown sugar gives a darker, more caramel-like layer than granulated.
- Moderate ovenReckoned at about 350-375F. In a heavy cast-iron skillet the cake may want longer than the 30 minutes given; test with a skewer in the center of the cake, not near the fruit.
- Slice the apples thin, and mean itThe apples get no precooking at all, so anything thicker than about 1/8 inch will still be firm when the cake is baked through. A firm variety that holds its shape — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy — behaves better than a soft eating apple, which collapses into sauce.
- Turning out is the hinge"When cool" is the one instruction to ignore. Cooled caramel welds itself to the pan. Rest the cake 5–10 minutes, run a knife around the edge, then invert onto a plate while it is still warm; scrape any apples left behind back into place.
- Batter over fruitThe recipe says to pour the batter over the apples. It is thick enough that you may need to spread it gently to the edges, taking care not to dislodge the fruit layer.
- YieldDepending on the pan used, roughly 8 modest servings. Best eaten the day it is made.
Upside-down cakes are older than the name — cooks were baking fruit under batter in a skillet and flipping it out long before anyone called it that — but the term itself spread through American community and church cookbooks in the 1920s and 1930s, helped along by the pineapple canners, whose recipe pamphlets made the pineapple version nearly synonymous with the form. Apple is often said to have been the thrifty domestic default: a bowl of windfalls, a cast-iron skillet already on the stove, and a one-egg cake batter simple enough to assemble from memory. That this recipe gives no quantity for the butter and sugar in the pan is itself telling — whoever set it down took for granted that everyone reading knew how much sugar covers the bottom of a skillet.