Great Depression Pineapple Squares Recipe - Old Cookbook Show
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 ก.พ. 2023
- Great Depression Pineapple Squares Recipe - Old Cookbook Show
Yes depression era foods and depression era cooking was for the most part about thrift for a lot of people... it doesn't mean that people stopped eating, or stopped making foods that were fun or used exotic ingredients. I'm sure your grandparents walked uphill both ways in a snowstorm barefoot and hungry to get to school and home again everyday - but when they got home they probably had a slice of cake just like this. (they just never mention that part of the story)
Pineapple Squares
2 cups TOWN CRIER Flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons sugar
¼ cup shortening
1 egg
½ cup milk
3 tablespoons sugar
1 cup crushed pineapple
¼ cup chopped almonds
Sift the first four ingredients together. Cut in the shortening. Add the beaten egg and milk together. Add the crushed pineapple. Mix well and turn into a shallow, greased pan (about 9x9 inches). Sprinkle with the chopped nuts and the three tablespoons sugar mixed together. Bake in a hot oven (425 degrees F.) about 25 minutes. Cut in squares and serve hot with butter.
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Yes - as many of you have taken the time to point out; I overpoured the milk by about 60 mL (¼ cup), and yet everything turned out fine.
Instead of pointing out the mistake, perhaps we could reflect on what we've learned from it?
Which is this: There is a huge amount of leeway for measurement errors when baking. The old adage "Baking is an exact science" isn't completely true, and just causes stress and strikes enough fear into many people that they won't try to bake.
If you learn one thing from this channel it should be this: You can be a little sloppy, and yet everything will still work out.
So maybe if less milk went in, we could use the whole can of crushed pineapples and it would still be just as moist yet more pineappley? That sounds like an experiment to test out.
That's such a good point. I really learned to be more easy going with adjustments to recipes from Rachael Ray and her 30-minute cooking show. She would say something like "use crushed tomatoes or pureed tomatoes or tomato sauce -- whatever you've got." This helped me realize that you could change up some things based on what you have rather than running to the store or leave something out if you don't like it.
I rarely measure anything. It drives my daughter crazy, but, I think my results, although never the same, are always delicious! I like the idea of understanding the concept, knowing what flavors go together and then winging it! Fun and Yum!
Absolutely! There always needs to be room in baking to experiment and explore the different limits and results.
the "baking is a science" thing drives me crazy because recipes are written by humans often guessing and making arbitrary decisions.
Everyone.... VERY IMPORTANT. When using canned pineapple in virtually any recipe that was written before the 1990's, keep in mind that essentially all of those recipes use pineapple canned in HEAVY SYRUP.... today, 90% of canned fruit in the store, including pineapple, is canned in it's own juice, and not heavy syrup, so you'll need to adjust the sugar level accordingly, or make sure you get fruit in heavy syrup. This goes for pretty much any older recipe that uses canned fruit.... as fruit canned in it's own juice did not exist in the 30's, and all the way through at least the 70's, and part of the 80's. I found the brand of pineapple that Glen has there online... and sure enough, it's in it's own juice. So it can be assumed the recipe was meant to be sweeter than his actually turned out.
Good info.
True, but I think that even with unsweetened fruit this would make a very nice coffee cake. Chopped dried pineapple would be very nice, and add some spice to the topping. Cardamom, maybe, or a bit of garam masala.
Great info. Thanks.
Thank you!
Yes, but for those of us that find most cake recipes to be too sweet as written I’ve never “compensated” for the lack of heavy syrup at all and never had an issue with flavour. In fact I will usually halve the amount of sugar anyway especially from North American recipes.
I could see this with some coconut flakes on top instead of the almonds. Would give it sort of a Piña Colada vibe
Came here to say this.
There is another type of square - might actually be called Pina Colada squares, that you make with coconut and I think sweetened condensed milk. I think of it as being very 1960s-70s. Different era.
Yes coconut 🥥 yum yum yum
Look up lazy daisy csje. Sounds wacky but it’s wonderful
Long time ago when I went to cooking school (mid-70’s), the baking instructor talked about whether and when sifting was necessary. The bottom line was: milling, packaging, and shipping flour is very different than it was pre-WWII and most modern flours do not need to be sifted.
Sifting helps combine dry ingredients and it adds some airiness to recipes like angel food cake, but a good whisking is really all you need to do. Nice to see Glen confirm that.
EastSider, that's what I was thinking. When I was very young, my mom (who was born in 1925) would buy flour in 50-pound bags. She was raised to sift flour, so made us sift it from the big bag into the smaller canister. It seems only the old cookbooks say to sift. Flour is just produced differently now, so sifting isn't needed. Thank goodness! Geez, I hated sifting.
Jules coming in and accidentally saying "Hey Flen! Hey Friends!" is adorbs.
Got to admit I laughed out loud, loudly, when you referenced Townsend's 😂😂😂 can't wait to see more recipes from this book! As far as companies putting together these cookbooks they would have employed home economists a job that doesn't even really exist anymore. When I grew up school districts employed them at their schools so that children would have nourishing meals provided to them. We should rethink a lot of how we do things.
I think my grandmother made something like this but with applesauce instead of crushed pineapples, and it was chunky applesauce that she made herself, so the texture may have been similar to these squares.
Sounds good. You could add cinnamon to batter if none in applesauce
I was thinking that this would work with chopped apples in place of pineapple.
I would have exchanged the milk for a mixture of pineapple juice, coconut milk and good rum, add candied pineapple chunks, then top it all with the mixture of brown sugar and freshly shredded coconut flakes. It would make an interesting "pinna colada" cake.
Do you deliver? Sounds great! Wonderful, even! I always like coconut flakes instead of shredded coconut.
@@kayekaye251 Ah, if internet only had an option for cake sharing... I dared and made the recipe with mentioned substitutes just the other day, for a friend. Some excellent rum was sacrificed and freshly made pineapple juice. It was, shortly said, amazing! And I agree, coconut flakes would have been a better choice than shredded coconut, but I had only shredded coconut this time and it was already delicious. I can imagine coconut flakes making it even better!
THIS is my ASMR. Lazy Sunday morning, watching Glen cook. Perfect.
Funny that you mentioned the Townsends, one of my other favorite cooking channels, for entirely different reasons than this one. 🙂
My grandmother made this but used brown sugar and pecans for the topping. I think I need to make this soon. :)
love your written video description.. lol
the sarcasm is strong with this one..
Wonderful recipe, I was sick with Covid in January and I started binge watching your show and have been every since. Very much enjoy it.
This sounds really good. I think I would leave out the almonds and use coconut instead, chopped candied pineapple and reduce the amount of sugar in the topping. I will be giving this recipe a try!
I have found the flavor of canned pineapple varies greatly from one can to another. Some have a very strong fruity flavor, and then the next time I get the same brand it's a more watered-down flavor.
my mom use to make this when I was a kid (back in the 70s and 80s) , but instead of pineapple, she would rough chop apples, and used slivered almonds. I now make it using her recipe from time to time.
Look's scrumptious!
Great with a cup of tea
Love it
I would absolutely make this.
That "oh" after the mention of streusel topping. So adorable. And yes I laughed, mostly because I recognized and related to what just happened. 🤣
Appreciate also having the full recipe for the peanut bread shown at the end :)
This kind of reminds me of the old boxed Angel food cake and canned pineapple desert. My wife loves to make that.
Happy Sunday!
Yay, a hometown cookbook! I have been keeping an eye out for a good one to send you.
I had always heard (I do not know if it's true) that back in the day, sifting was mostly to make sure you got the weevils and uncrushed grains out of your flour before you used it.
😎👍👍luv the recipe Glen, this is another Glen and Friends, must bake!!🙏🙏
I think a lot of people who comment on cooking shows, and other shows which demonstrate a highly developed skill set (the vintage radio repair shows are a good example) are people who lack the...for want of a word I can use here...social graces.
Goodness - anyone who has followed this show for more than one episode knows that when Glen says a teaspoon of vanilla he means at least three. When he adds a pinch of salt, it's enough to ward off bad luck for a decade. Sixty ml 'too much' milk is perhaps at the limit of what works, but a few extra minutes in the oven and it's all good.
Have you considered making your own cookbook Glen? Something that gets into the history of things, nobody else is doing this and it's fascinating.
Tasting history does a little something like that but not like glen here does they cover different aspects in different way.
Both Max Miller and Dylan Hollis have cookbooks coming out. I would like to see Glen do it too, because he has some wonderful techniques that are so adaptable for different ingredients.
Thank you for the reminder. I have done steps out of order and not ruined bakes more than once. I try not to be too precious specifically because of your videos. You do a great service to home bakers in this way.
Precise instead of precious?
@@NotKev2017 Both would work, but for an obsessive personality like mine, the more pejorative term is better. 😁
That looks delicious.
Good morning friends!
Love your sweater Julie😊😲
its like a crumb topping coffee cake with pineapple in the mix, luv these old recipes
This sounds very similar to a lot of German fruit cakes, which also typically are topped with a crumble/Streusel mixture, or almonds and sugar.
Strussel is very similar to the word we have in Swedish, Strössel. Which is refering to candy toppings you usually have on cakes and pastries🙂
That is a pretty cake !Butter makes everything better!!!! And what Brock mentioned about the sugar content on the canned fruit.
Looks good
I am going to try pineapple tidbits due to crushed getting lost. Besides I really like pineapple and just may add more... lol I too love depression era recipes. My Grandmother's cookbook ended up "at large" when she passed away which made for some unhappy campers. Thank you Glen for your channel!
Glen - there was a parallax error when you were measuring the milk. The camera was parallel to the benchtop - you were pouring milk from above.- as one dose - you saw 1/2 cup but the camera saw 3/4 cup. Perhaps the extra 1/4 cup of milk made the cake moister than it should be?!
Thought so at first as well. Look at the back side of the measuring cup, Glen's side, through the front. The milk was a bit foamy and on the edges rode up the side over the mark. The liquid level was closer to the 1/2 cup mark than the 3/4 one.
I have found that modern flour in small batch sizes rarely needs to be sifted. That said depends on the brand, your storage scenario too. Also, large batch stuff (I work in a professional kitchen) absolutely benefits from sifting. More even mixing and less flour clumping.
This reminds a lot of the Betty Crocker (tole cover book) of a basic coffee cake topped with a strudel topping.
Well done Glen, this is enough for my sweet tooth & will give it a try….& as u said at the end of the video to use pineapple chunks…😎👍
Hey Glen! Is this a possible early version of "Granny Cake"? Looks very similar. Thanks for the great videos. You're truly the Bob Ross of the kitchen.
I was under the impression that all of the sifting, creaming, egg one at a time, etc., was if one were doing it by hand. Since we have powerful stand mixers, I don’t really do that. I do cream butter and sugar, but add all eggs at once, and I don’t bother sifting flour since what we use is so much finer than what they used, and the stand mixer power, too. What I bake turns out well every time. TFS!
I have a recipe from my grandmother is very close to this! She added candied pineapple pieces along with the crushed. She also added toasted coconut with toasted macadamia nuts on top. SO delicious!
My mom had a recipe similar to that. I think she got it from either Hour Magazine (TVShow) or some actual magazine. The cake was just flour, sugar, baking soda, and whole can of crushed pineapple( i don’t think anything else in the cake). It has a cream cheese frosting that is put on when the cake is still warm. It is crazy sweet. The cake gets kind of a caramel flavor from the baking. Whenever we have it, it is one of those cakes that disappears an inch at a time. My mom and dad would just take a little bite whenever they passed by. The cake goes away, but everyone says where did it go? I only had 1 slice (no one counts the bites they sneak).
Thank you for sharing this recipe. My grandmother used to make it. Only, without the almonds. She did a crumble with graham crackers and the rest of the pineapple. So nothing was wasted. I had almost forgotten this since she always did this one, as well as a few other lost food loves, from memory. She liked it better with diced/cut, avoiding crushed since that always gets lost in the baking. She also used this for her upside down cakes. Don't worry about the extra milk, common practice to stretch the recipe to feed more folks. Common practice. ;) Update: I just remembered something! My grandmother would use the syrup in place of milk, finishing it off with water to meet the volume. When we had it, she would grab pineapple juice saved in the freezer or liquor. So yes, this recipe has a lot of ways of being changed.
Definitely different than what we call pineapple squares. Ours is a shortbread Crust and shortbread crumbs on top on the pineapple.
Hi Glen. Another great video/recipe.
QUESTION: Do you have your extensive library of cookbooks on a spreadsheet or some type of list so that a subscriber could see if you already have a copy of a recipe book they maybe thinking of sending you?
Love this question- I was thinking the same thing!
@@laurenrt7564
Thanks Lauren. If he doesn’t I would be willing to help him do one.
It would be so interesting! I am looking forward to a video about his cookbook library
I made this tonight for dessert. We haven't eaten it yet, because we just finished dinner. However, I didn't have almonds and The Spousal Unit isn't all that fond of almonds, so I grabbed some peanuts, ran them through the grinder and used that. It smells spectacular.
Hi Glen! I used to use No Name canned pineapple but didn’t find it tasted very pineapply. I went back to Dole. using Dole might give you more of a pineapply taste. Just a thought! 😊
Carmelizing the pineapple might give the cake more depth of flavor and bring out the pineapple more.
Hi Glen and Jules. It's disappointing that the squares lack a substantial pineapple flavour. You're right that adding some pineapple chunks may help.
And speaking of pineapples, Glen I love your vintage CBC cap with the "exploding pineapple" logo!
I can't wait to try this, I think I might put shredded coconut on top with the sugar and maybe a little bit of pineapple essence to boost that flavour further?
You should do 2 videos. One where you make the original recipe and another where you update it and possibly make it better. That would be fun.
I’ll plan on candied pineapple and candied ginger!
That looks really tasty. Your food processor is nice and quiet, most are very noisy
A good point about the advertising cookbooks being better tested than the community ones - the latter sometimes take a very careful eye to avoid some strange results!
I've found when looking at vintage recipes, that the less interesting the ingredient they were advertising, the more likely the recipes are to be good. A flour company didn't have to try very hard to come up with new recipes that integrated flour - but 300 recipes from the pineapple company might have involved some oddities.
I think one reason the later cookbooks are less reliable is that so many food manufacturers consolidated - by the '80s you ended up with recipes where everything but the salt was listed with a brand name.
One of these days, you should do a side-by-side with the original recipe and one of the ideas you get after doing the tasting.
I have an abnormal fear of cutting in butter. We have this thing called an ulu knife … kind of like a mezzaluna but without long handles (you hold it like a bench scraper) … and though it is not for this purpose, decided to try it. Worked like a charm and saves me from getting out the stepstool to reach our food processor.
This reminds me of a cookie recipe that is my family’s favorite - I would have to add nutmeg
Townsends would second the nutmeg!
Geez people, lighten up on the milk thing. Even if there was extra milk, the cake still turned out fine.
People have pointed out about the heavy syrup that would have been in the can but also that it was a different variety of fruit. The old ones were sweeter, smaller and darker colour, texture in the raw. Nicer than the hard modern.. people don’t like it much more. It doesn’t break up in the can like the old but it is flat tart. Australia grew lots and it was part of summer.
I wonder what candied ginger would be in this cake. :) Dawn @ Rich & Dawn in MN :)
A quick cheaty fruitish cake, a packet butter cake mix and a tin of fruit. Simple anyone can do cook as per cake mix packet
Hi Glen. Just discovered the “Lemon Olive Oil Cake”. Would love to see your take/opinions on this! (I checked, and I don’t think you’ve covered it. Cheers from the UK! :)
I found a copy of the book and ordered it. Pretty rare it seems
I love almonds, so I love all those on top. Did it give it a little bit of a crunchy texture on top after you bit into it?
I'm willing to bet that cake would taste good soaked in rum
Yum! 😋
I used Amaretto!
You can’t necessarily substitute butter for shortening as it has quite a bit of water in it that may change things in the finished product. Thanks for the fun video
The amount of 'extra water' is vastly overstated by most.
someone can not follow direction
½ cup milk but you used 3/4 of a cup
Glen knows how to follow directions, but he's also not a slave to ingredient amounts. Its one of the reasons I like watching him bake and cook
This cake looks a lot like the pineapple upside down cake I make. I use pineapple chunks or crushed instead of rings. I also use big brand name pineapple. The recipe I use is older also. Always so tasty with the pineapple!
My housemate makes a version with extra brown sugar and cherries. It's Heaven on a plate.
I think if you would have drained the pineapple and then added 1 cup you would have had more pineapple in the cake and maybe more pineapple taste?
I’d try adding some pineapple extract.
Sunday morning and I got up and made a yoghurt quick bread... you're an influencer, or a you tuber or something
Glen: Today’s pineapple cake looked interesting. But that HAT, now that’s really interesting!!! Had to stop the video at 1:58 to get a good look at that 1974 date on the right side. Did that come from one of the 1974 Canada-Russia hockey games? Did you actually get to see Canada play and win in the one and only victory in the 1974 eight game series at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto? Respectfully, W.S.
The 1974 is is reference to the year that the CBC adopted the 'Gem' Logo... though to some of those who worked there the logo has a much less savoury moniker.
I would also consider adding pineapple rings to the top when “strusselizing” the top.
A coconut streusel topping would be good, if you like coconut. ;)
I like it quite a lot as it is, but I might make it a little tangier and tastier with a couple teaspoons of apple cider vinegar to simulate buttermilk, add vanilla, swap in a touch of soda for the rather large amount of baking powder. I also used brown sugar for the topping instead of white on this first try, and I like it. I agree with others that at least a little cinnamon in the topping would give it a little more pop too.
Also, in a 9x9 it's a little thin and only takes about 20 minutes to cook at my (3000+ foot) altitude. 8x8 would perhaps work better. Also also, I did the whole thing in the food processor, easiest cake ever.
I would add more pineapple or pineapple flavoring. Then add red and green color maraschino cherry halves on top for Christmas with a thin powdered sugar glaze. 😋
I had to pause to read their recipe for Bishop's Bread. that one is nothing like the one my mom used to make for Christmas every year. hers had glazed cherries, dates, chocolate chips, and walnuts.
What the food processor brand? I can't find it anywhere. Please.
I can't recall the specifics off the top of my head but I seem to remember that using crushed pineapple in cakes like this is a "hack" to make it more moist. The pineapple flavor basically disappears and its entire purpose is not for flavoring.
The very first thing i thought when Glen said about mixing milk, egg and pineapples is that milk could probabply curdle up because if pineapples,but i Wonder if it should
I wonder if coconut would be good too, instead of almonds?
I think I would forget about the almond/sugar topping and just add a topping of fresh whipped cream and pineapple chunks. But we use weights here, not cups so it doesn't always translate well for me.
I would use coconut instead of almonds, but other than that it seems very nice.
I'd be tempted to try making this with applesauce and walnuts rather than pineapple and almonds.
winner winner chicken dinner ... dessert
How about increasing the pineapple flavor by using bigger pieces of pineapple. Maybe add those canned rounds in addition to the crushed pineapple?
I wonder if the author of the recipe meant for the pineapple to drained. Also most canned pineapple in this period was with heavy syrup and you appeared to be using juice canned fruit. This may account for the lack of pineapple flavor and sweetness.
kinda like the fruit cocktail cake
Make this into a Pina Colada cake by exchanging the almonds to coconut shavings. And maybe the milk to coconut milk/cream
Do they make pineapple extract?
I think I would drain the pineapple, and use it all. And also use coconut on top instead of the almonds maybe?
I wonder if adding more pineapple would have bumped up the flavor? Oh, and Go Kansas City Chiefs!!!
Glen I bet you go silent when your hands are tied.and I think it’s cute that Jules falls in with the hand gestures. Definitely the two have become one. I’m not attacking, I think it’s cute.
use coconut instead of almonds ?
Was that a half cup of milk? Looked like much more based on the lines