Pineapple Icebox Cake
Old black & white photographs of the ports of Baltimore bring to mind a gritty and sooty place; smog and ship steam and oyster shells. It is harder to imagine the loads of colorful & sometimes fragrant cargo coming into the port: tomatoes, bananas, coffee, citrus fruits. Much of it was headed to the city’s many canneries.
From April through July in the 1800s, the ports could expect thousands and thousands of pineapples shipped from the Bahamas. If the pineapples arrived ripened, they were shipped off to one of the dozens of packing houses. If they had gone bad, they were unceremoniously dumped into the harbor.
Baltimore saw lots of trade and plenty of fruit importation, but the pineapple fleet was greeted with “color and ceremony,” according to a 1940 Baltimore Sun reminiscence by Dean Wanamaker. “After a winter on the Chesapeake Bay, captains cleaned, painted and generally refurbished their ships… They tried to outdo one another. Coming into the harbor, they would fly all the flags and buntings they could get aloft.”
1842 Advertisement, Baltimore Sun
The schooners docked along Pratt Street and the packing houses would sound whistles to their workers to retrieve the cargo.
Baltimore was the primary touchdown point for pineapples from the Bahamas, the industry peaking around 1900, with millions of pineapples processed and millions of dollars made (adjusted for inflation).
These Bahamian pineapples were not the first pineapples that Baltimore had ever seen. Before the American Revolution, Charles Carroll the Barrister had an indentured convict gardener named John Adam Smith to oversee his Pinery. A visitor from Jamestown in 1770 wrote that Carroll’s pinery was expecting a yield of 100 “Pine Apples” the next summer. Attempts to grow the popular status symbol fruit were not uncommon at the time. Typically, manure would be piled around the rows of pineapples to emit heat during the colder months.
Carroll’s gardener absconded, as evidenced by a 1773 advertisement in the Maryland Gazette: “TEN POUNDS REWARD…Ran away…a convict servant man, named John Adam Smith…by trade a Gardener, has with him…a treatise on raising the pine-apple, which he pretends is of his own writing, talks much of his trade and loves liquor.” Perhaps this was the end of pineapple farming in Baltimore.
Mr Loudon’s Improved Pinery, 1811
This recipe comes from “Wine and Dine with The Lake Roland Garden Club,” a 1935 book full of cocktails, canapés, and wine advice, plus the usual assortment of community cookbook recipes for cakes and weeknight dinners (or, as they called it in the Roland Park Garden Club, dinner “for the maid’s night off.”)
The recipe for Pineapple Ice Box Cake doesn’t have a contributor name, but I traced it to a 1933 Knox Gelatine recipe book. The Lake Roland Garden Club cookbook committee tastefully removed the brand name from the ingredients list, but other than that the wording is identical.
Knox Gelatine cookbook, 1933, archive.org
Icebox cakes developed in the early 1900s along with the increased popularity of… you guessed it, iceboxes. Originally they were made with a cooked custard containing eggs, but gelatin manufacturers were happy to step in and simplify the process. The Pineapple Icebox Cake is a match made in branding heaven: by this time, pineapple branding was in full force, but consumers were not reaching for canned pineapple from Baltimore.
Hawaii was taken as a U.S. Territory in 1898, and in 1900, Sanford Dole, who had been serving as “President,” became the territorial governor. Sanford’s cousin Edmund Pearson Dole came to Hawaii and parlayed his connections there to eventually build a canning empire. With the canneries close to the pineapple fields, and a low-paid immigrant workforce, canned pineapple became more cheap than ever. Dole’s branding of Hawaiian pineapples made them into an American staple.
Baltimore could not compete. One by one the Baltimore pineapple canneries closed. Wannamaker wrote that by 1940 “only a handful of shippers and packers remember[ed] that Baltimore was once the greatest pineapple center in the world.”
Recipe:
- 1 envelope gelatin
- .25 Cup sugar
- 1 Tablespoon lemon juice
- .25 Teaspoons salt
- .25 Cup cold water
- 1 Cup canned crushed pineapple
- lady fingers or stale sponge cake
- .75 Cup whipped cream or evaporated milk
Pour cold water in bowl and sprinkle gelatine on top of water. Place bowl over hot water and stir until dissolved. Add pineapple, sugar, salt, and lemon juice. Cool, and when it begins to thicken, beat, and fold in whipped cream or whipped evaporated milk. Line sides and bottom of square or round mold with lady fingers (any stale cake may be used). Cover with pineapple cream mixture, then alternate cakes and cream until mold is filled. Place in refrigerator for three or four hours. To serve, unmould on cake place and garnish with whipped cream and strawberries in season. Fresh or canned strawberries, raspberries or peaches, or any preffered fruit may be used instead of the pineapple. Mosre sugar will be needed for fresh fruit.
Recipe from “Wine and Dine with the Lake Roland Garden Club,” 1935
