January 24: Allgood Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

Up until my fourth-grade year, I had been a Montessori child.  I began public school that year highly prepared academically and behaviorally.  I was, however, wholly unprepared for lunch in a school cafeteria.  My mother had been sending me to Montessori school with a lovely, balanced, healthy lunch every day.  I carried a hand-painted, metal lunch pail filled with good food and a cloth napkin (color coordinated with the pail).  My lunches had contained sandwiches on whole grain bread along with Dannon yogurt that had been frozen the night before to defrost by lunchtime.  My homemade lunches never contained any treats but fruit.  In an effort to fit in, I left my lunch pail at home and opted to buy lunch and milk at my new school.

I was pretty surprised when a square slice of pizza served with canned corn and my choice of (chocolate!) milk was handed to me on a plastic tray by a lady in a hair net.  But I will never forget the shock I received the first day the cafeteria offered Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.  My homeroom teacher read the lunch menu aloud during morning announcements and I was thrilled that one of my absolute favorite desserts was on offer that day!  At lunchtime, I stared down the line of stainless steel and glass, past whatever entree and side dish was being served and saw the craziest-looking Pineapple Upside-Down Cake I had ever seen.  It was just YELLOW CAKE with some pineapple slices and sad cherries!  Dubious, I tasted the alleged Pineapple Upside-Down Cake anyway.  More is the pity.  That cake tasted just as boring as it looked; it wasn't real Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.

I chalked-up the disappointment to the public school experience, alongside field day and having to learn to play "Suicide is Painless" on the recorder.  It took years of real-world experience for me to realize that the divine upside-down cake I had eaten before fourth grade was an outlier made only by the ladies in my family.

My great-grandmother, Judith Allgood Page, made a dessert every Sunday for midday dinner.  It was usually a simple dessert like a chess pie, banana pudding or strawberry shortcake made with store-bought sponge cake cups.  But in the wintertime, she often made Pineapple Upside-Down Cake and served it with whipped cream.  Her cake was made with rich, spicy gingerbread cake and a gooey layer of glazed pineapple rings and cherries.  When I was growing up there was a delicious gingerbread cake mix made by Dromedary that made upside-down cake easier.

When I started cooking on my own, I searched for the Dromedary mix in its distinctively retro orange/yellow/white box.  I had a terrible time trying to find it, so I gave up and started a quest for an alternative from scratch.  In the October 2000 issue of Gourmet magazine, I found the perfect recipe in the "Letters From Our Readers" section.  Mrs. Lindsay's Gingerbread Cake recipe makes my ideal Pineapple Upside-Down Cake.

Pan prepped with butter, brown sugar,
pineapples, cherries

My mother always made her upside down cake in a square pan.  A square pan seems more gingerbread-y than a round pan or the cast iron frying pan some upside-down cake recipes recommend.  As I prepared to bake, I was disappointed not to find my square cake pan.  (Some of my excessive collection of cooking implements are packed away in storage.  Our last house had an enormous kitchen and my collection had grown to a size that our current home cannot possibly support.)

The final product

I figured, the square pan is packed away and more cake is never a problem so, I doubled the recipe and used my 9x13x2" pan instead.



The entire house smells like a warm, spicy heaven.  I served each slice with lightly-sweetened whipped cream.

There is plenty for leftovers; some for the neighbors and a special slice for Mom.

Next Saturday:  Chocolate Sour Cream Bundt Cake