Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

Made popular by automation.

You might think of a pineapple upside-down cake as a triumph of down home cookery, but it was the industrial age that brought it home.

While skillet cakes long predate cultivated pineapples (tarte Tatin, for example), the pineapple upside-down cake’s success began with the 1911 invention a machine to slice pineapples into perfect rings. The inventor was Henry Ginaca, a native Hawaiian contracted to create the machine be the Dole company; his invention and its later iterations were named “Ginaca machines” in his honor.

Once this cake became more convenient than its apple or cherry cousins, mentions of the pineapple iteration started to appear in the mid-1920s.

From the box of C.C. from Ceres, California.

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