A Love Affair with Southern Cooking (62 page)

The two-tone version here—for me the quintessential Japanese Fruitcake—was given to me years ago by Pauline Gordon, a housing specialist with the North Carolina Agricultural Extension Service. An elderly lady when I went to work in the “state office” in Raleigh, Miss Gordon was famous for her Japanese Fruitcake, an old family recipe from Kingstree, South Carolina. Like other extension specialists, Miss Gordon traveled the state, in her case to teach Home Demonstration agents the finer points of interior decorating. As she drove, she liked to keep a wedge of Japanese fruitcake on the empty seat beside her for a handy snack. One day a yellow jacket, perched on the piece she slipped into her mouth, stung her tongue. Being an old country girl, Miss Gordon simply pulled onto the shoulder, grabbed a gob of wet clay, and rubbed it on the sting—“to draw the poison and stop the swelling.” I don’t know if this old home remedy worked but I do know that she lived to tell the tale. Many times.

Cake

3 cups sifted cake flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, slightly softened

2 cups sugar

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

4 large eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup seedless raisins or dried currants (these are actually tiny Zante raisins)

1 cup coarsely chopped pecans

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground allspice

½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Filling

1½ cups fresh orange juice

¹
/
₃
cup fresh lemon juice

Finely grated zest of 1 large orange

Finely grated zest of 1 large lemon

2 cups sugar

¼ cup unsifted all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon salt

3 cups freshly grated coconut or sweetened flaked coconut

• 1.
  For the cake: Preheat the oven to 350° F. Coat four 9-inch layer cake pans well with nonstick oil-and-flour baking spray and set aside.
  
• 2.
  Sift the cake flour, baking powder, and salt onto a piece of wax paper and set aside also.
  
• 3.
  Cream the butter, sugar, and vanilla in a large electric mixer bowl at moderate speed for 2 to 3 minutes or until light and fluffy. Beat the eggs in one by one, then reduce the mixer speed to low and add the sifted dry ingredients alternately with the milk, beginning and ending with the dry. Beat after each addition only enough to combine; overmixing will toughen the cake.
  
• 4.
  Divide the batter in half. Quickly dredge the raisins and pecans in the all-purpose flour and fold into half of the batter along with the cinnamon, allspice, and nutmeg.
  
• 5.
  Spoon the yellow cake batter into two of the pans, dividing the total amount evenly, then the spiced batter into the remaining two pans, again dividing evenly.
  
• 6.
  If possible, bake all four layers at the same time on the middle oven shelf for 20 to 25 minutes or until springy to the touch and a cake tester inserted in the middle comes out clean. Otherwise, bake the two yellow layers, then the two spice. Cool the baked layers in the upright pans on wire racks for 15 minutes, then invert on the racks and cool to room temperature.
  
• 7.
  Meanwhile, prepare the filling: Combine all ingredients but the coconut in a large, heavy, nonreactive saucepan, set over moderately high heat, and cook, stirring constantly, for 5 minutes or until thickened and smooth. Reduce the heat to low and simmer uncovered, stirring now and then, for 10 minutes. Add the coconut and cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, for 20 to 25 minutes or until the consistency of marmalade.
  
• 8.
  To assemble the cake: Center a spice layer on a large round plate and spread generously with the filling. Top with a yellow layer, press firmly into place, and spread with more filling. Repeat—spice layer, yellow layer—each time pressing the new layer firmly into the one underneath and spreading with filling; don’t be stingy. The last of the filling goes on top of the cake, not on the sides, although if some of it dribbles down the sides, so much the better. That’s how I Iike it.
  
• 9.
  Let the cake stand for at least 24 hours before cutting; this gives the filling time to seep into the cake and firm up a bit.
  

BLACKBERRY JAM CAKE WITH BROWNED BUTTER FROSTING

MAKES ONE
9-
INCH
, 2-
LAYER CAKE

Blackberries grow wild over much of the South and from early childhood on my brother and I would head into the brambles to fill our buckets. Daddy made a competition of the picking and rewarded the owner of the first filled bucket with a dollar—a fortune in those days. My Illinois mother turned the berries into jams and jellies, pies and cobblers. But never this spicy cake; I obtained the recipe while on assignment in Kentucky several years after she died. I have since eaten similar cakes in that swath of Appalachia that meanders through Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina before dipping into northernmost Georgia and South Carolina. Some cooks frost their jam cakes with chocolate icing but I think this browned butter frosting is a better choice.

Cake

1½ cups sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground ginger

½ teaspoon ground allspice

½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

½ teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons (¾ stick) butter

2 large eggs

¾ cup sieved blackberry jam

1½ teaspoons baking soda

1½ cups buttermilk

²²
/
₃
cups sifted all-purpose flour

Filling

1 cup sieved blackberry jam

Frosting

4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter, chilled

2½ cups unsifted confectioners’ (10X) sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon salt

3 to 5 tablespoons half-and-half, milk, or evaporated milk

• 1.
  For the cake: Preheat the oven to 350° F. Coat two 9-inch layer cake pans with nonstick oil-and-flour baking spray and set aside.
  
• 2.
  Combine the sugar, cinnamon, ginger, allspice, nutmeg, and salt in a large electric mixer bowl. Add the butter and beat at moderately high speed for about 2 minutes or until light and fluffy. Beat the eggs in one by one, then mix in the jam.
  
• 3.
  Quickly dissolve the baking soda in the buttermilk (it will fizz), then, with the mixer at low speed, add the flour alternately with the buttermilk mixture, beginning and ending with the flour. Do not overbeat or your cake will be tough.
  
• 4.
  Divide the batter among the two pans and bake in the lower third of the oven for 40 to 45
  minutes or until the layers pull from the sides of the pans and are springy to the touch.
  
• 5.
  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.
  
• 6.
  To assemble the cake, place one layer upside down on a large round plate, spread with the jam filling, and set the second layer on top, this time right side up.
  
• 7.
  For the frosting: Melt the butter in a small, heavy saucepan over low heat, then allow it to brown slowly for 10 to 12 minutes or until the color of amber. Pour into a ramekin and set in the freezer for a few minutes or just until the butter begins to harden.
  
• 8.
  Using a hand electric mixer, cream the chilled butter, the confectioners’ sugar, vanilla, and salt until smooth, then beat in the half-and-half, tablespoon by tablespoon, until the frosting is a good spreading consistency.
  Note:
  You can make the frosting in a food processor fitted with the metal chopping blade. Simply whiz the butter, sugar, vanilla, and salt for several seconds until creamy, then pulse in the half-and-half 1 tablespoon at a time.
  
• 9.
  Swirl the frosting over the top and sides of the cake, then allow to dry for at least an hour before cutting. Make the pieces small; this cake is rich. Just what Southerners like.
  

If you drop a dish cloth while you’re cooking, company will come and go hungry.

—
OLD SMOKIES SUPERSTITION

LANE CAKE

MAKES AN
8-
INCH
, 4-
LAYER CAKE

Open any southern community cookbook and you’re likely to find Lane Cake. Or rather, one of the many versions of this popular Alabama white cake. Some are three-layer, nine-inch cakes, others a towering four layers but only eight inches across. Mainly, however, it’s the frosting and the egg yolk–thickened coconut filling that vary. Most fillings also contain bourbon (or brandy), pecans, and raisins, plus a few glacéed red cherries or maraschinos. Some recipes call for frosting the cake with the filling as well as spreading it between the layers because “it’s the best part of Lane Cake.” In my search for authenticity, I find that the older Lane cakes include not only recipes for a rich fruity filling but also one for boiled icing. Originally called “Prize Cake” because it had won a prize at the Alabama State Fair, this classic later took the name of its creator, Emma Rylander Lane of Clayton, Alabama. Mrs. Lane published the Prize Cake receipt in her cookbook,
Some Good Things To Eat
(1898). But according to Cecily Brownstone, longtime food editor of the Associated Press and a friend of Mrs. Lane’s granddaughter, that recipe was “vague in the extreme.” Does this explain why there are so many different Lane cakes? The recipe here is an especially good one. Do as Southerners do and serve it at Christmastime. It’s a delicious substitute for fruitcake. Note:
To finesse the sticky job of chopping raisins, I use dried “currants.” They are actually Zante raisins, a variety so small they need no chopping.
Tip:
For this cake (indeed for most cakes), southern cooks would use one of their beloved “soft” flours such as White Lily or Martha White.