A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (60 page)
Read A Love Affair with Southern Cooking Online
Authors: Jean Anderson,Jean Anderson
MAKES ONE
9-
INCH
, 4-
LAYER CAKE
The famous Confederate general never tasted this particular cake, for it’s one of the dozens of variations of Mrs. Lee’s Cake (see the Heirloom Recipe at left) that surfaced after the Civil War. This delicious but distinctly different version is the specialty of the historic Beaumont Inn in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and has been ever since Annie Bell Goddard first baked it. That was nearly 100 years ago, soon after she and her husband bought a Greek Revival building (c. 1845) that had been a school for young ladies and turned it into an inn. As for the cake’s name, there’s an easy explanation for it as well as for the Lee memorabilia scattered about the inn, which Goddard descendants, the Dedmans, now run with style and grace. Annie Bell Goddard was a fan of Robert E. Lee and her cake does him proud. I ordered it for dessert when I visited the Beaumont Inn some twenty-five years ago and liked it so much that I adapted the original recipe (printed in
Beaumont Inn Special Recipes
)
for a “best of the Bluegrass” food and travel article I was writing for
Family Circle
.
This is my adaptation. Note:
When making the frosting, use the yolks of pasteurized eggs. They go in raw and though salmonella poisoning wasn’t a problem in Annie Bell Goddard’s day, it can be today (see About Pasteurized Eggs, frontmatter).
Cake
2 cups cake flour, sifted twice before it is measured
1½ teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon cream of tartar
9 large eggs, separated
2 cups sugar, sifted six times
Finely grated zest of 1 large lemon
Juice of 1 large lemon
1
/
8
teaspoon salt
Frosting
Two 16-ounce boxes confectioners’ (10 X) sugar
½ cup (1 stick) butter, cut into slim pats and softened slightly
Finely grated zest of 3 large oranges
Finely grated zest of 2 large lemons
¼ cup fresh lemon juice
3 large pasteurized egg yolks (see Note, Chapter 6)
3 to 4 tablespoons fresh orange juice
- 1.
For the cake: Preheat the oven to 325° F. Grease four 9-inch layer cake pans well and set aside. - 2.
Sift the flour with the baking powder and cream of tartar six times and set aside. - 3.
Beat the egg yolks in a large electric mixer bowl at high speed for about a minute until thick. Beat the sugar in gradually, then add the lemon zest and continue beating at high speed until the color and consistency of mayonnaise. This will take about 10 minutes. Beat in the lemon juice. - 4.
Sift about one fourth of the flour mixture over the yolk mixture and fold in by hand, gently but thoroughly. Repeat twice. The last of the flour mixture goes in at the end. - 5.
Beat the egg whites with the salt until stiff peaks form. Blend about one third of the beaten whites into the yolk mixture to lighten it, then scoop the remaining whites on top and fold in until no streaks of white or yellow show—easy does it. Using the lightest of touches, fold in the remaining flour mixture. - 6.
Divide the batter among the four pans and rap each lightly on the counter to expel large air bubbles. - 7.
Bake the cakes in the lower third of the oven for 25 to 30 minutes or until springy to the touch and a cake tester inserted halfway between the center and the rim comes out clean. - 8.
Invert the cakes on wire racks immediately but do not remove the pans. Instead, cool the cakes to room temperature in the upside-down pans. Lift off the pans and let the cakes stand for 1 hour before frosting. - 9.
For the frosting: Beat the confectioners’ sugar, butter, orange and lemon zests, lemon juice, and egg yolks until smooth and silky. Begin at low mixer speed, then gradually raise it to high as the sugar is incorporated. Finally, add just enough of the orange juice to make the frosting a good spreading consistency. - 10.
Sandwich the four cake layers together with some of the frosting, then smooth the rest over the top and sides of the cake. - 11
. Cut the cake into slim wedges and serve.
Note:
Because the frosting contains raw egg yolks, refrigerate any leftover cake.
GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER (1864–1943)
He’s been called “The Father of Peanut Butter” but that doesn’t begin to cover the contributions made by this “poor insignificant black boy,” as he once described himself.
Born toward the end of the Civil War near Diamond Grove, Missouri, Carver is said to have been kidnapped along with his mother and sister by Confederate night raiders. His master, Moses Carver, paid to have them returned, but only baby George was found.
Always sickly and thus spared the toil of hardier slaves, young George was allowed to wander field and forest studying the wild plants. With the abolition of slavery, the Carvers took the child in, raised him as their own son, and encouraged his intellectual curiosity.
Earning a high school diploma was nearly impossible for a freed slave, but Carver succeeded by bouncing from school to school in Missouri and Kansas. College followed, first Simpson in Indianola, Iowa, for music and art, then Iowa State for undergraduate and graduate degrees in agricultural research. At both schools, he was the first black student.
In 1896, Booker T. Washington lured Carver to Alabama to teach and conduct research at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. He stayed until his death nearly fifty years later.
It was here that Carver’s “peanut obsession” began. Determined to help farmers decimated by the boll weevil and spent land, Carver championed peanuts as a way to replenish the soil’s nitrogen. He also advocated crop rotation. But old ways die hard.
That’s when Carver set out to prove how lucrative peanuts could be. Over time, he developed more than 300 uses for the lowly legume—everything from peanut butter to cooking oils and candies. And these were merely the “edibles.”
His 1925 extension bulletin
How to Grow the Peanut and 105 Ways of Preparing It for Human Consumption
begins, “Of all the money crops grown by Macon County farmers, perhaps there are none more promising than the peanut in its several varieties and their almost limitless possibilities.” Among the booklet’s 105 peanut recipes are soups, breads, pies and puddings, cakes, cookies, and candies, even ice creams.
By now Carver had become famous, dispensing advice to presidents (Calvin Coolidge and both Roosevelts) as well as to world leaders as disparate as Henry Ford, Mahatma Gandhi, and the Crown Prince of Sweden, who studied with Carver for three weeks.
In 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt bestowed the Roosevelt Medal of Outstanding Contribution to Southern Agriculture upon Carver, and a year later he budgeted $30,000 for the George Washington Carver National Monument near Carver’s Missouri birthplace. Carver half-dollars were minted between 1951 and 1954 and commemorative stamps were issued in his honor in 1948 and again in 1998.
And still the accolades come, some sixty years after George Washington Carver’s death.
No, “The Father of Peanut Butter” definitely doesn’t cover it.
MARTHA WHITE FLOUR
Unlike Betty Crocker, Martha White wasn’t a made-up icon. She was the pretty three-year-old daughter of Richard Lindsey, Sr., who founded Nashville’s Royal Flour Mill in 1899.
The Martha White logo (a picture of little Martha in a round frame) was reserved for Lindsey’s finest flour. Milled of low-gluten wheat, it was the cotton-soft flour Southerners depended upon for biscuits and cakes of delicate crumb.
When Tennessean Cohen Williams sold the family farm and bought the old Royal Flour Mill in 1941, he changed the company’s name to Martha White, the better to build the brand. He also created the slogan—“Goodness gracious, it’s good!”—which, by 1945, was appearing on every bag of flour and cornmeal that came out of his mill.
In another canny move, Williams made Martha White the official sponsor of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1948. It still is, although the company itself has since been gobbled up by a succession of conglomerates, from Pillsbury to Smucker’s.
Originally available only around Nashville, and then only in the South, Martha White products (flours and cornmeals plus a roster of jiffy mixes) are now sold in supermarkets from Michigan to New Mexico. Still, it’s down south that they’re as hot as fresh-baked biscuits.
FRESH COCONUT CAKE
MAKES ONE
9-
INCH
, 3-
LAYER CAKE
To use an old southern expression, “it grieves me” to see young southern cooks abandoning family heirloom recipes in favor of cake mixes. Especially since many of America’s classic cakes originated down south: Lady Baltimore, Lane Cake, Japanese Fruitcake. I hesitate to add coconut cake to the list, but I will say that it’s always been a southern specialty and that no one made it better than Annie Pool of Halifax County, Virginia. Her kin all call her coconut cake “the nearest thing to ambrosia.” When I interviewed Annie Pool some years ago, she shared a few secrets: Only fresh coconut put through a meat grinder would do (if she’d had a food processor, she could have saved worlds of time), but even more important, Annie Pool sprinkled the water (from inside the coconut) over each cake layer before she iced it. That explains her cake’s exceptional moistness. Note:
If you’ve never grappled with a fresh coconut, here’s how to go about it: Before you break the coconut open, loosen the meat by rap-ping the shell all over with a hammer. Next, pierce two of the coconut “eyes” drain off and reserve the coconut water. Now using the hammer, crack the coconut into manageable pieces and pry the meat from the shell. Remove the dark skin with a vegetable peeler, then rinse the coconut in cool water and pat dry on paper toweling. Finally, cut the coconut into 1-inch chunks and pulse in two-cup batches in the food processor until finely ground.
Cake
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
1 cup (2 sticks) butter, at room temperature
2 cups sugar
4 large eggs, separated
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon lemon extract
Reserved coconut water (see headnote)
Icing
4 cups sugar
11
/
3
cups water
3 tablespoons butter
11 cups finely ground fresh coconut (you’ll need 2 to 3 coconuts) (see Note at left)
- 1.
For the cake: Preheat the oven to 350° F. Coat three 9-inch layer cake pans with nonstick oil-and-flour baking spray and set aside. - 2.
Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt onto a piece of wax paper and set aside. - 3.
Cream the butter in a large electric mixer bowl at high speed for 2 to 3 minutes or until light and silvery, then, with the motor running, add the sugar gradually. Continue beating for 2 to 3 minutes until light and fluffy. Add the egg yolks and beat till fluffy. - 4.
Combine the milk, vanilla, and lemon extract. With the mixer at low speed, add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk mixture, beginning and ending with the dry and beating after each addition only enough to combine. Beat the egg whites to soft peaks and fold into the batter—gently—until no streaks of white or yellow remain. - 5.
Divide the batter among the three pans and bake in the lower third of the oven for 35 to 40 minutes or until the layers pull from the sides of the pans and are springy to the touch. - 6.
Cool the cake layers in their upright pans on wire racks for 10 minutes, then loosen around the edge and turn out on the racks. Cool to room temperature. - 7.
For the icing: Combine the sugar and water in a medium-size heavy saucepan and insert a candy thermometer. Set over moderate heat, stir until the sugar dissolves, then cook uncovered without stirring until the syrup reaches 232° F. Remove from the heat, drop in the butter, and cool for 20 minutes. - 8.
Meanwhile, place 8 cups of the ground coconut in a large bowl. As soon as the syrup has cooled for 20 minutes, beat for 1 minute with a hand electric mixer at high speed. Pour the syrup over the coconut in the bowl and toss well to mix. - 9.
To assemble the cake: Center one layer on a large round plate. Sprinkle with
1
/
3
cup of the reserved coconut water, then spread with the icing—not too thick—and scatter some of the remaining ground coconut on top. Repeat with the two remaining layers, pressing each firmly into place. Cover the top and sides of the cake with the remaining icing and coconut.
Note:
Both are crumbly, but if you press them firmly into the cake, they’ll stick. - 10.
Let the cake stand at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours before serving. To cut the cake, use your sharpest serrated knife and a gentle seesaw motion.
LADY BALTIMORE CAKE
MAKES A
9-
INCH
, 3-
LAYER CAKE
While researching my
American Century Cookbook
(1997), I was surprised to discover how many versions there were of this beloved southern cake. Some were white cakes, and some were yellow like the original, a variation of the popular “lady” cake of the day, said to have been created by Alicia Rhett Mayberry of Charleston. While visiting the South Carolina town he called America’s “most lovely…most wistful” in the early 1900s, novelist Owen Wister discovered the cake at the Women’s Exchange Tea Room there.
Lady Baltimore
,
he called the cake, the tea room, and his best-selling set-in-Charleston novel published in 1906. Was his
Lady Baltimore
heroine based upon Charleston belle Alicia Rhett Mayberry? Some say so. There is no denying, however, that Wister’s rhapsodizing about Lady Baltimore cake sent readers scurrying for the recipe. He writes of it as early as Chapter 1: “I should like a slice, if you please, of Lady Baltimore…Oh, my goodness!…It’s all soft, and it’s in layers, and it has nuts—but I can’t write any more about it; my mouth waters too much!” The recipe here is updated and adapted from Alicia Rhett Mayberry’s, which appears in
Two Hundred Years of Charleston Cooking
(1930), a recipe anthology assembled by Blanche S. Rhett and edited by Lettie Gay. Note:
Refrigerate any leftover cake.