a dishpig pickin' cake

A layer cake of convenience-food parts: yellow or butter-golden cake mix beaten with eggs, oil and a can of mandarin oranges, juice and all, baked in three eight-inch pans and frosted with a can of crushed pineapple folded into instant vanilla pudding and whipped topping, sometimes with pecans or coconut on top, and served cold. It is North Carolina's barbecue dessert by name — the pig pickin' being the whole-hog party where guests pick the meat off the pig — and it is carried to those parties; Hysmith places it at barbecue restaurants too, though it is a home cake first. Our State calls it an essential companion to any good barbecue, noun not verb.

The cake has no founding story that anyone has documented, and two writers have looked. KC Hysmith, tracing it in 2024, found the oldest recipe she could name in the Raleigh News & Observer in 1975 and a reference in the Boca Raton News in 1980; every ingredient but the eggs comes from a can or a box, which reads like a brand's test kitchen, but she could not find which brand, and the 'Nancy Ware's cake' some sources credit stays a mystery. She reads it as a variation of the Pineapple Dream Cake of the convenience-food years. John Shelton Reed told her North Carolinians did not say 'pig-picking' until the 1970s, so the name is a child of that decade; Inference — the cake is older than its name, renamed for the party it was carried to. Liz Biro, in Coastal Review in 2017, gives the folk reason the state claims it — the name, and the way orange and pineapple cool the mouth after tangy pork — and notes that when Google sorted Thanksgiving searches by state in 2014, the New York Times reported pig pickin' cake as North Carolina's first. Our State printed Mavis Brannon of Mooresville's version the same year, sent in by her daughter, who remembered her yeast rolls as well. Chowhound records pea pickin' cake and sunshine cake as other names; Biro calls the first a mistake.

One box of yellow or butter-golden cake mix, four eggs, a quarter to three-quarters cup of oil and an 11-ounce can of mandarin oranges, chopped and undrained, beaten together and divided among three greased and floured 8-inch pans; 350 degrees for 15 to 20 minutes, then cooled through. The frosting is a 16- or 20-ounce can of crushed pineapple, drained, stirred into a small box of instant vanilla pudding, with two 8-ounce tubs of whipped topping folded in and, in Biro's version, a cup of chopped pecans. The layers are stacked and covered, top and sides, and the cake goes into the refrigerator; it is served cold and keeps there, loosely covered, a few hours by Our State's count. Some cooks bake it as a single layer or as cupcakes and finish it with orange segments, coconut or toasted pecans.

A home cake, carried to pig pickins and Thanksgiving tables: the dish North Carolinians searched for most in November 2014, by Google's count as the New York Times reported it. Recipes in Our State (2017) and Coastal Review (2017); Hysmith (2024) and Chowhound (2025) on the name. The barbecue-house menus read for this record — Lexington Barbecue, the Barbecue Center, Sam Jones, Parker's — do not list it.