Retro Recipes and Traditional Fare

When a wine is described as "jammy" I always think of blackberries. Rich, ripe, fruity flavors so intense they almost taste more cooked than fresh. Blackberries, when fully ripe and sweet, not sour, taste like jam to me. Jammy also means "lucky" according to an Australian English dictionary I recently consulted. I think one slice of this cake will make you feel very lucky indeed! I certainly feel lucky to have gotten the berries from my friend Alton who brought them back from his mountain cabin hideaway, Shadow Woods.

I'm assuming since you are visiting this site, that you probably use the internet to find recipes. I sure do. One thing I particularly find useful are the reader comments. For example the recipes on Epicurious often have suggestions from readers on changes and improvements they have made to the posted recipes. Sometimes their suggestions make sense, though not always.

This recipe started out as one I found online, but based on reader comments, a little experimenting, and ultimately my own experience I made it my own. How different is it from the original?

I remember reading her words like it was yesterday. Molly once said that prunes were among the few foods with their own built-in laugh track. And gosh darnit, she’s right. I still giggle when I think about them, even when people were saying they were delicious and I should try them. And you know exactly what this boy is talking about, quit trying to be coy and pretend you don’t know.  We’re friends here.

Luckily I can now tell you that I no longer laugh as hard as I once did when I say the words prune and I can also tell you that I no longer put the palms of my hand to my lips and make mega-sounds.  And why? Because scattered among the yards and yards of breakfast items on the buffet table at Club Med in the Bahamas were bowls of stewed prunes.

If man could only have one pan, it would probably have to be an iron skillet. You can fry, bake, sear and roast with these workhorses of the kitchen. Baking, as in cornbread, is most often thought of when using these pans for non-frying purposes, but there is a class of cakes that take the cake when it comes to iron skillet cooking, and the Pineapple Upside Down Cake is one of them.

I actually made this cake for Mama and Mimi’s birthday. They share the same birthday and don’t always want the same cake for their special day, but, this one is a great neutral for our family – everyone likes it! Mimi makes hers in an iron skillet as did Mema, her mother. This is one of those desserts with one arm reaching back to the “Ol’ South” via an iron skillet and another broadly stepping into the mid-twentieth century with the Baby Boomers and the craze for canned fruit! It seems that by the 1980’s and 90’s fresh fruit was hard to come by in Suburbia, USA, but thankfully those days are waning and fresh, seasonal produce is here to stay!