鳳梨酥Pineapple Cake

The shell is a short, crumbly dough of butter, low-gluten flour, sugar and egg, somewhere between a cookie and shortbread, that falls apart at the first bite. The filling is made by chopping pineapple (or pineapple and winter melon) and cooking it slowly with sugar and maltose until the water cooks off and the jam turns thick and glossy. The more pineapple, the tarter and more fibrous the filling; winter melon makes it smoother and finer in texture.

A ball of filling is wrapped in dough, usually pressed into a square or rectangular mold, and baked until golden. Some bakers tuck an egg yolk, usually salted, into the center. A typical cake weighs about 45 to 50 grams and is usually individually wrapped, which is part of why it travels and gifts so well.

Nobody can say exactly when the first pineapple cake was baked. Some claim a history of more than a century, and others say it grew out of old-style wedding cakes, but neither claim is backed by reliable documents; industry accounts mostly place the modern pastry in the 1970s. Taiwan's canned-pineapple industry grew under Japanese rule and peaked around 1971, after which cheaper Southeast Asian producers took over the export market. With pineapples going unsold, Chinese-style pastry makers are said to have begun turning them into filling.

Pineapples of that era were fibrous and acidic, and a filling of pineapple alone was hard on the palate, so bakers blended in winter melon. A rotation crop grown in rice paddies during fallow periods, it was cheap, easy to find and fine in texture, and the blend became the mainstream filling; Taiwan's Ministry of Education Hokkien dictionary even lists 冬瓜酥, “winter melon pastry,” as another name for the cake. In Hokkien, 鳳梨 (王梨, ông-lâi) sounds like 旺來, “prosperity comes,” which makes the fruit and its pastry an auspicious gift. From the 1990s, bakeries turned toward the gift and souvenir trade, and in the mid-2000s Taipei City began holding an annual pineapple cake festival; AmCham Taiwan reported in 2016 that the industry's revenue grew from NT$3 billion in 2006 to NT$40 billion in 2013. More recently, fillings of pure pineapple with no winter melon have made a comeback. Some accounts link this to improved pineapple varieties that are less fibrous and acidic, while 土鳳梨酥 usually means a pure filling made from the older, tarter 開英 (Cayenne-type) pineapple.