![]() ![]() The perfectly even slices of tinned pineapple look more impressive, cut out a lot of faff and will give you something closer to the cake you may remember from school, but the acidity of the fresh fruit makes it a more complex dish, so I’ll leave it up to you. Which you choose depends on what you’re looking for. Only the recipe in Jamie Oliver’s Comfort Food calls for fresh fruit. ![]() Though the fresh sort is available year round at my local garage, most recipes remain loyal to tinned pineapple in either juice or syrup: Nigella Lawson, who admits in Nigella Express that she has only “vague nursery memories” of pineapple upside-down cake, goes as far as to say she feels it “slightly bad sport to start peeling and slicing your own pineapple”. This old idea became the hottest bake of 1926 and, where America leads, Britain eventually follows as Nigel Slater recalls, pineapple upside-down cake was “as exciting as cake got in 1960s Wolverhampton”, while Jamie Oliver waxes lyrical about the version served at his Essex primary school two decades later.įrankly, I still get quite excited about cake of any sort, but this is a particular pleasure to make, because of the theatre involved – and the way even the most slap-dash of bakers can turn out something surprisingly impressive-looking. Pineapples, however, were far too rare and costly to waste in such fripperies – far better just to hire one to show off to your friends – until James Dole’s Hawaiian Pineapple Company decided to put them in tins and market them to the public through the medium of upside-down cake. Unlike the Gypsy tart, however, which seems to have been created for the express purpose of filling up Kent’s schoolchildren with minimum expense, the upside-down cake has its roots in medieval griddle cakes, and sophisticated French relatives in the form of the gateau renversé, which evolved into the tarte tatin. This slab of sponge with its cheery ring of pineapple is one of my few positive memories of school dinners (all of which, I now realise, centre on foods consumed with custard). ![]()
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