Gil Marks

And in this country, they were called skillet cakes, cooked on top of the stove in cast iron.

The food historian Gil Marks found the first known use of the phrase upside-down cake in 1923 for a cake made with dried plums.

Then in 1925, the Hawaiian Pineapple Company ran a recipe contest judged by people from the Fannie Farmer School, Good Housekeeping, and McCall.

By the accounts that circulate, about sixty thousand recipes came in, and roughly two thousand five hundred of them were for pineapple upside-down cake.

The dish is Levantine.

Gil Marks, the food historian, traces it to the Turkish Soban Salatası, shepherd's salad.

Jewish immigrants arriving in Ottoman Palestine in the late 19th century encountered cucumber and tomato salad already being eaten here.

They didn't invent it.