Pineapples and cooking go together like ‘sunshine’ and ‘coast’. And now a large slice of our region’s agricultural history has been added to the mix of a new podcast series connecting listeners to memories, community and family through cake.
State Library of Queensland devotes an entire episode of Cake the Podcast to the sweet and tangy tropical fruit, the marketing genius behind a 1960s cookbook aimed at relieving a Sunshine Coast pineapple glut, and some treasured, family-favourite recipes from regional cooks.
Kaitlyn Sawrey hosts the new series that was co-created and written by her partner, US producer Frank Lopez – a team that won the 2022 Podcast of the Year for The Last Outlaws.
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Former executive producer of Triple J’s Hack, co-founder of the ABC’s Sciences Vs and perhaps best known for Spotify’s Who is Daniel Johns? podcast about the Silverchair band frontman, Kaitlyn was born and bred in Nambour and now lives in Caloundra after a career that took her to Brisbane, Sydney and New York, where she met Frank.
In what is affectionately referred to as ‘the pineapple episode’ of the seven-part series, Kaitlyn reveals her personal mission to perfect her 99-year-old Grandma Dean’s ‘secret’ recipe she made only once a year.
Sure, it’s a pie, not cake, but Kaitlyn tells podcast listeners: “If you tried its buttery shortbread crust filled with sweet pineapple and topped with hand-whipped cream, you’d understand why I’m making the exception and why my family fights over every crumb.”
Kaitlyn takes listeners into her Grandma’s kitchen with the “bright orange kitchen countertops, knick-knacks and fake flowers” in an old Queenslander where she had her first slice as a toddler.
“It’s a Christmas tradition for us to have pineapple pie,” she told Sunshine Coast News, following the podcast launch.
“And so, I’ve been on this journey to try to replicate it – which has not been easy because it’s all in her head.
“She doesn’t have a recipe, per se. She just knows how it should be put together. So, that’s been part of the challenge: cracking the Dean code.
“Uncle Gary went through his drawers and found some bits of paper where he’d written down the recipe after he’d followed Dean around the kitchen. My sister also at one point had followed Dean around the kitchen so there’s been a few attempts to actually capture it.
“But she was often making three pies at once. So, the recipe is not straightforward.
“The pineapple filling itself and the cream – the family agree I’ve got the flavours right. But it’s the base that has been the challenge.
“It’s about the thickness. I always get it too thick.”
Kaitlyn has now discovered that the pineapple pie recipe – some of which Grandma Dean outlines in her own words in the podcast – is very close to one in The Golden Circle Tropical Recipe Book, using canned crushed pineapple.
That famed, pioneering collection went on to became one of the state’s most influential cookbooks.
Just as Queensland had fruit rotting in fields in January this year as a result of unseasonal winter rain causing a mass natural flowering event, farmers found themselves in a pickle with a pineapple glut in the 1960s.
Northgate’s Golden Circle Cannery enlisted the help of home economist, Queensland’s earliest celebrity chef and “one-woman branding machine” Ruby Borrowdale, to write a cookbook to “inspire the nation’s housewives to cook our way out of the oversupply of pineapples”.
The vibrant pages were bursting with recipes using the spiky fruit “in every way shape and form”, including pineapple upside down cake.
Such was its popularity, the recipe book – with glazed Christmas ham adorned with pineapple rings and tropical parfaits on the cover – can still be found on kitchen shelves throughout the nation, passed down through the generations.
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Regional NSW blog The Pineapple Princesses started recreating the cookbook’s recipes in 2012 in a test kitchen and also features on the Cake podcast.
Anne Fisher and her friend Ann had a passion for the flavoursome fruit that is high in Vitamin C and began the exercise “as a tribute to Ruby Borrowdale”.
Fisher’s audience – now stretching around Australia and as far away as Russia and the US – has been eating up more than 1000 pineapple-based recipes, including 90 cakes, over the past 11 years.
One of the Coast’s best-known Indigenous chefs, Aunty Dale Chapman, of Forest Glen’s My Dilly Bag, is another big pineapple fan who appears on the podcast episode.
“She grew up out west, and because they were really remote, often they would rely a lot on tinned things,” Kaitlyn said.
“Her Mum made her pineapple upside down pineapple cake for her 12th birthday and it was her favourite cake. She now makes it with Indigenous flavours.”
Dale, who toured the Golden Circle cannery once on a school visit, tells the listeners she adds a twist to the recipe by using native mint through the caramel, adding wattleseed to the base cake, or substituting the pineapple with lily pilly or quandong.
It all makes for tasty content in the podcast that came about after State Library staff found some fascinating stories about cakes and cooking while going through archive collections.
“For (Frank and me), it was a really interesting concept because when it comes to cake, it’s really about family and memory and story and the way things are handed down,” Kaitlyn said.
“We’ve just had our own little girl so we wanted to up our cake game.
“It’s been a really fascinating project to work on.
“It’s been really nice to delve into this history because I grew up across the road from a pineapple farm, not far from the Big Pineapple.
“Pineapples have been kind of omnipresent in my life. This tradition of making pineapple pie at Christmas, it’s just really nice to delve into it and figure out how we got so obsessed with pineapples.
“We talk about how pineapples ended up in Queensland, and then why there were so many on the Sunshine Coast.
“The first pineapple field was planted where the Treasury Casino now stands … right in the middle of what is Brisbane City now.
“By the ’50s, we had a pineapple-themed week and a ball that was held at the Nambour Showgrounds.”
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