Time Travel Kitchen

A Pineapple Upside-Down Cake Recipe, 1926

My personal saga with the pineapple started 30 years ago, when I cut one up the wrong way for world-renowned chef Wolfgang Puck.

I’d just graduated from cooking school and was very nervous during a live cooking demo in New York City in front of a couple of hundred people. I had mistakenly cut slices instead of chunks. I froze. Fortunately, another intern swooped in and bailed me out as if an alarm — “We Need Pineapple Chunks, STAT!” — had sounded. That’s the thing about kitchen teams: people jump in and things keep moving. I was very grateful to her, the Chef continued the demo seamlessly, and the audience was none the wiser.

Every time I’ve cut a fresh pineapple since then, which frankly hasn’t been all that often, I think of my ‘You Had One Job!’ moment and chuckle.

This week, the story is about canned pineapple. The Hawaiian Pineapple Company, started by Jim Dole (now Dole Food Co.) began canned pineapple production in the early 1900’s. The company sponsored a recipe contest in 1925 asking home cooks for recipes using their canned pineapple product. This once-luxury tropical fruit was now readily available in affordable canned form. Skillet cakes had been around for centuries, but with the addition of pineapple, this one became a show-stopping dessert.

Thousands of recipes for Pineapple Upside-Down Cake were submitted to the contest and an ad campaign followed. The popularity of the dessert skyrocketed from then into the 1950’s and ‘60’s. I’m doing more research on this 1925 contest and the winners, so stay tuned for another post, and adapted recipes, down the line.

If my Instagram feed is any indication, this nearly century-old dessert is making a comeback. The cake itself has had its own ‘ups and downs’ in terms of popularity, but has never completely disappeared.

I made the Pineapple-Upside Down cake that’s pictured above in my cast iron skillet. I used a recipe from Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes, a 1926 cookbook issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide listeners to the radio show with printed copies of the recipes they heard. It’s called ‘Upside-Down Pineapple Cake’ in this edition.

If you’d like to give this classic dessert a try, it’s worth it. It makes a tender cake with chewy, slightly crunchy caramel surrounding the layer of sweet pineapple. I added the maraschino cherries, as most recipes do, but the original recipe doesn’t call for them. I like the look of the cake dressed up with the bright cherries and for the additional bit of sweetness that they give. Substitute cake or pastry flour for ‘soft wheat flour’. The recipe is attached below.

I always listen to music on the radio when I cook or bake. In my kitchen, I can imagine a woman with bobbed hair in an apron in the style of the 1920’s, flipping an upside-down cake, listening to the radio. Maybe she’s even tuned in to The Housekeepers’ Chat featuring Aunt Sammy. A friend wrote me that my 1920’s kitchen has given me a way to travel back in time and to be inspired by the touch and feel of this small space. Exactly right…and I learn something new every day.

Next week: Oven-Baked Rice Pudding from a 1927 magazine recipe and the history of my kitchen cabinets installed in 1927 and made by The Murphy Bed Door Company.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this recipe.

See you next week.
Jolene ps - I used a 10” skillet and 5 pineapple slices instead of 3 ;)

Sources: USDA; Aunt Sammy’s Radio Recipes, copyright 1926; Dole Food Company; Dole Sunshine; The Kitchen Project; What’s Cooking America; Quaint Cooking; Wikipedia.

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