11 Once-Popular Desserts That No One Eats Anymore

Looking for the perfect way to finish your meal? Whether you reach for cake, pie, cookies, or something else that's sweetly satisfying, desserts have been around since antiquity, and they'll probably be on dining room tables for centuries to come. But everything has its day, and desserts rise to popularity and then fall out of fashion, while other classics remain popular for decades. It's a shame that these desserts have fallen out of fashion because they're just as sweet and satisfying as ever. We'd love to see these forgotten desserts reclaim their place on menus and at dining room tables today.

A sweet Southern classic, banana pudding used to be so popular that the recipe came on every box of Nilla Wafers. Made with pudding, Nilla Wafers, whipped topping, and bananas, this sweet trifle-like dessert is soul-satisfying. In the 70s and 80s, banana pudding showed up on tables all across the United States, thanks to the recipe finding its way into so many homes. Sadly, the Nilla Wafters box no longer features the recipe, in spite of the fact that the cookies are still an essential ingredient in banana pudding. You still can find this classic dessert in the South, but without its presence on a box of popular cookies, it's now a vintage recipe that you're unlikely to find anywhere else in the country.

Back before ice cream cakes surged in popularity, you had the Baked Alaska. This confection, made with cake, ice cream, and meringue, is as much a magic trick as it is a tasty dessert — after all, when else would you be able to bake ice cream without it melting? The trick is to rely on the insulating effect of the whipped egg whites to keep the ice cream from melting as you bake it quickly on high heat to brown the meringue.

The Baked Alaska has been around since the 1800s. It showed up on restaurant menus, reportedly to celebrate the United States acquisition of Alaska from Russia. The great thing about baked Alaska is how easy it is to customize — with all the different flavors of cake and ice cream — the combinations are practically endless. That's why it's a shame that it used to be a staple on fine dining menus, but today, you seldom see it.

Anyone growing up watching television in the 60s, 70s, and 80s is probably intimately familiar with custard pie as a comedy prop. It's the classic "pie-in-the-face" pie present in so many slapstick comedies, from its first appearance in a 1913 comedy called "A Noise from the Deep," to Laurel and Hardy, to the Three Stooges, to "I Love Lucy," and beyond. Custard pie has been around for centuries, not only in slapstick comedy but on dessert tables everywhere.

It came to America with the British colonists, and it has a ton of variations, including chess pie, pumpkin pie, and rhubarb custard pie. But plain egg custard pie that showed up on Grandma's dining table? You seldom see it anymore, and it's such a shame. From the buttery, flaky crust to the smooth vanilla egg custard at the center, it's a simple pleasure that's well worth serving to your friends and family.

Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, a handsome blonde-haired, blue-eyed movie star named Robert Redford made women around the world swoon at his good looks. In the same decades, an easy-to-make layered dessert with a cake-like bottom layer, a cream cheese middle layer, and a pudding top layer started appearing on tables across the United States, and those same swooning women were equally obsessed. So it's no surprise that this delicious layered dessert was deemed The Next Best Thing to Robert Redford(or sometimes, Sex in a Pan), and the result is dessert history.

While the name was sometimes shortened to simply Robert Redford and there were all kinds of flavor variations, the dessert was ubiquitous on potluck tables and at dinner parties everywhere. Robert Redford himself has aged beautifully, and he's still around. But sadly, The Next Best Thing to Robert Redford hasn't had quite the staying power. Still, anyone would be thrilled to show up at a dinner party and Robert Redford was there holding a pan of The Next Best Thing to Robert Redford.

During Christmases past when people headed into the kitchen to make all sorts of cookies and candies for the holiday, you couldn't open a tin of Christmas goodies without spotting some pristine white mounds or squares of homemade candy, usually studded with pecans or cherries. Super white, slightly sticky, and incredibly sweet, divinity is like a little piece of Heaven that tastes like super-chewy marshmallows. It's another Southern classic that was wildly popular across the country for a few decades.

Much like many desserts, divinity's origins are murky. It's American — but it may be Turkish. If you've never had it and want to try your hand, it takes about 45 minutes and some candy-making know-how that involves boiling sugar and corn syrup to a very high temperature, and the challenge of making it may be why it has disappeared in the past few decades. This sweet candy is still a Southern tradition, but it's not common anywhere else in the US anymore, and that's a real shame.

If you're in Pennsylvania, particularly during the fall, then there's a good chance you'll come across Apple Dumplings. They make the most of Pennsylvania's abundant apple harvest and showcase it in the most delicious way — wrapping sweet-tart apples and spices in a buttery, flaky pastry and baking them until the apples are soft and the pastry is golden-brown.

Apple dumplings originated in the 1800s in England and made their way across the pond to the U.S. and Canada. Sadly, they've fallen out of favor around North America, although they remain popular in Pennsylvania. But it's a challenge to find these pastry-wrapped apples on dessert menus anywhere else these days. Thank goodness they're still available in Pennsylvania because apple dumplings are a simple and delicious pleasure that you'll seldom find outside of apple country.

These black-and-white square cookies look a lot harder to make than they are. They're actually easy to bake, using a single dough for both the brown and the white squares. They're a type of icebox cookie, traditionally flavored with chocolate and vanilla squares, although you'll find recipes with all kinds of variations. Still, checkerboard cookies don't show up in cookie jars much anymore, fading in favor of more popular flavors like chocolate chip or white chocolate macadamia, and that's a darn shame.

Pineapple upside-down cake used to be a real showstopper, with caramelized rings of pineapple adorned with bright red maraschino cherries topping a moist and tender cake. Baking a cake over the top of fruit isn't a new idea — it has been around for centuries. But a contest for canned pineapple recipes from the Dole company in the 1920s brought pineapple upside-down cake to the attention of home cooks, who impressed their family and guests with it for more than five decades.

If you've never had it, pineapple baked with brown sugar and butter in the bottom of a pan full of cake batter is sweet, tropical, and caramel sticky in the most delicious way possible. With or without the cherries, it's a treat for the tongue and the eyes. It's time Dole revived interest with another challenge.

For those familiar with all of the interesting things people used to encase in JELL-O in decades past, it may come as a surprise that JELL-O wanted to get their gelatin into even more recipes. So in the 1970s, JELL-O came up with the idea of poke cake — poking holes in a cake and filling them with flavored gelatin. The result was colorful, to say the least. The idea caught on like wildfire, and JELL-O poke cakes were a huge fad through the 1980s. But like many fads, the interest in gelatin poke cake faded, replaced by new desserts. Today, you don't see the classic JELL-O poke cake much, but you will find it with more exotic ingredients like Champagne or bourbon.

If you've never had the pleasure of being present when a dessert is lit on fire, then it's high time you did. It's like a show and dessert all in one, and it brings a sense of occasion you don't get with something like an ice cream sundae. And cherries jubilee is definitely an occasion, which makes sense when you know its history. It was created by the "king of chefs and the chef of kings," August Eschoffer for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebration in 1897, and it caught on like — well — wildfire. You used to be able to find this flaming cherry dessert on fine dining menus around the world as an exciting finish to a delicious meal, but you won't find it much today. It's too bad, too, because the world needs more desserts with a touch of theater.

Whether you call them floating islands, oeufs à la neige, or snow eggs, these snowy white meringues floating in crème anglaise (vanilla custard) make an elegant dessert. And for decades, any chef worth their salt had a floating islands recipe in their back pocket.

The recipe first appeared in the 1747 cookbook "The Art of Cookery" by Hannah Glasse, and it was a mainstay for centuries. Sadly, you won't find it on many menus now, replaced by new flavors and dessert recipes that lack the history of a true classic that has mostly disappeared from American dessert tables like so many other classic desserts.