Warm Spiced Pineapple Cakes

Pineapples may not seem particularly British but, in the eighteenth century, English gardeners led Europe in pineapple growing. The gentry competed with each other to raise them in ‘stove houses’, buildings heated by Dutch stoves, the ancestors of our modern greenhouses. The public became so passionate about the fruit that wrought-iron gates and fences were topped with pineapple shapes, which can still be seen to this day. But pineapples did not become truly common until the late nineteenth