H. David Dalquist, a metallurgy expert who unwittingly secured a place in culinary history when he cast the first Bundt cake pan in 1950, died Jan. 2 of heart failure at his home in Edina, Minn. He was 86.
Dalquist made the Bundt pan -- a ring form with a center post and elegantly fluted sides -- for the Minneapolis chapter of a Jewish women's society whose members sought to reproduce a cake their European mothers had made.
Sixteen years later, the confluence of a baking contest, changes in women's lives and the rise of convenience foods made the pan a kitchen staple and put Dalquist's Nordic Ware brand on the baking world's map.
His Minneapolis-based company has since sold more than 45 million Bundt pans and inspired a host of imitators, making the distinctive cake mold one of the most popular in the world.
It was not his only first. Dalquist also pioneered a carousel that rotates foods during microwaving, microwave splatter covers, microwave egg poachers and other products that worked in both conventional and microwave ovens. But none of these innovations made him as famous as the humble Bundt pan.
A native of Minnesota, the state that also gave the world Bisquick and Spam, Dalquist trained in chemical engineering and served as a Navy radar technician in the Pacific during World War II before entering the plastics business with his brother.
In 1948, Dalquist and his wife, Dorothy, purchased Northland Aluminum Products and began manufacturing bake ware under the Nordic Ware name. It proved to be a smart move in the postwar boom years as women returned to domestic routines, including home baking.
In 1950, Dalquist was approached by members of Hadassah, the Zionist women's volunteer society, who wanted to re-create the dense cakes their mothers made. One of the women provided as a model a ceramic dish that her German grandmother had used to make the ring-shaped bread called kugelhopf. They asked if Dalquist could make one of these pans in a modern material.
Dalquist, whose motto was "If you can sell it, you can usually make it," produced the pan in cast aluminum for the Hadassah members. He also made some to sell in department stores and called this early model a bund pan, borrowing a German word that means an alliance or bond. Later, in order to trademark it and perhaps avoid association with the German-American Bund, a pro-Nazi organization active in the 1930s and 1940s, he added a T.
