Best Food Writing 2010 (31 page)

PEOPLE OF THE CAKE

By Diane Roberts From
The Oxford American

English professor, NPR commentator, BBC filmmaker, and
Oxford American
contributor, Diane Roberts sketches her family history in
Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans, and other Florida Wildlife.
Cake, she insists, is one of their secret weapons.

I
come from a family of cake fundamentalists.

We are people of the Cake. A baby is born and welcomed with cake; there’s cake for anniversaries, cake for graduating high school or college; cake for passing the bar or the CPA exam, cake for winning Second Runner-Up in the Miss Peanut pageant; cake for getting out of prison, cake for visiting kinfolk, cake for Christmas and Easter and the Fourth of July; cake when you marry, when you’re sick, when you die.

Proust journeys back to the past via a madeleine (a small, scallop-shaped cake, not a cookie); in
The Unvanquished
, Faulkner uses cake—or the remembrance of cakes—to conjure the lost days of peace and plenty before secession. Granny Millard asks Marengo and Bayard what they’d like her to read to them. They want the cook book: “Read about cake.” Coconut cake, to be exact. Craig Claiborne, the brilliant food writer and Delta gourmand, was also a coconut cake man:

One of my earliest recollections was watching my mother or one of the servants tediously grating coconut in large quantities, sometimes for ice cream, sometimes for a curried dish, but more often than not for coconut cake, which was one of Kathleen Craig Claiborne’s great specialties.

Indeed, one of my earliest recollections is watching my own grandmother whack a coconut with a machete. She’d hammer a sixteen-penny nail into the coconut’s “eyes” and drain out the juice. Then she’d rive it in two and carve out the meat with an oyster knife. After only four or five hours of gouging, hacking, beating, boiling, and whipping, she would present the cake on a cut-glass stand that had been a wedding present to her own grandmother. It was as white and shining as a debutante’s gown, covered in hand-shredded coconut, fuzzy as a French poodle.

I come from a family of cake fundamentalists. No mixes, no faux cream, no margarine, no imitation vanilla, no all-purpose flour. You should use Swans Down or some other cake flour: It’s made of soft winter wheat with a low protein content, which makes the cake finer and airier. If the recipe says fresh coconut, don’t you dare use that stuff in the bag. Suffering for your cake builds character. (We are Presbyterian, after all.) The first time I made Grandmama’s fresh coconut cake, I grated the skin off my knuckles. People said it was delicious: You really didn’t taste the blood at all.

After my fingers healed up, I moved on to making Old School cakes that didn’t require hatchets, machetes, or other weaponry. Lady Baltimore cake is a luxurious pile of nuts, figs, cherries, and egg whites, soft as tulle and sweet as divinity. With that name, you’d think it was some old Maryland recipe dating from the days of the Calverts, but according to John and Ann Bleidt Egerton, it was invented by one Alicia Rhett Mayberry, a Charleston belle, sometime near the turn of the twentieth century. Owen Wister, author of
The Virginian
, named his 1906 novel after it:

”I would like a slice, if you please, of Lady Baltimore,” I said with extreme formality. I returned to the table and she brought me the cake, and I had my first felicitous meeting with Lady Baltimore. Oh, my goodness! Did you ever taste it? 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.

In 1898, Emma Rylander Lane of Barbour County, Alabama, published the recipe for what she called her “prize cake,” a four-layer white sponge filled with an opulent mixture of egg yolks, raisins, and booze. This is the cake, remember, that got Scout tipsy in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. If you do it right, putting at least three-fourths of a cup of hooch (Emma Lane called for “one wine-glass of good whiskey or brandy”) in the filling and drizzling another cup over the layers, letting it soak in, the Lane cake is a cocktail in baked form. I don’t hold with lazy-ass modern versions that use boxed mix (I’m talking to you,
Southern Living
) or omit the bourbon. I realize there are people who insist that Jesus didn’t turn water into wine at Cana, claiming it was actually Welch’s grape juice. Please. Like Jesus would be so tacky.

Even foot-washing Baptists in dry counties know better than to make a Lane cake without alcohol. Celestine Sibley, the longtime columnist for the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
, tells how her mother, not a drinker but a committed baker, drove down to Panama City, Florida, after church one day—hat, gloves, and all. She walked into a bar as “dark as the inside of a cow.” A young woman “half naked and downright impudent” slinked over, saying, “Madam, this is a cocktail lounge.” Evelyn Sibley drew herself up and replied, “My dear, I didn’t think it was the Methodist parsonage! I’ll have a half-pint of Early Times, please.”

We cakeists value tradition. I’ve had the same kind of birthday cake (Angel Food), perched on the same cut-glass cake stand my grandmother used for her coconut cake, every single year of my life. At my first birthday, my mother made a magnificent pink cake decorated with spun-sugar daisies. The photographic evidence shows I smashed my fist into it. I’m told that I licked the thick, seven-minute icing off my arm and laughed. Now, I make sure there are no cameras around on my birthday.

For Christmas, it has to be fruitcake: a serious fruitcake, with muscovado sugar, candied pineapples, candied lemon and orange peel, citron, red and green cherries, raisins, cinnamon and nutmeg, cloves and ginger, dates and chopped pecans, baked slow and low. It’s a treasure box of complex flavors, each one richer and more intoxicating, more seductive, than the last. Especially if you’ve kept the cake wrapped in rum-soaked cheesecloth for at least a month.

Fruitcake goes back to the Romans, maybe to Mesopotamia for all I know. The cookery book that Martha Washington worked on from the time of her wedding in 1749 to Daniel Custis until 1799, when her granddaughter Nelly Custis married Lawrence Lewis, contains four recipes for what she called “great cakes”—as opposed to small. Here’s the one she made for Epiphany, or Twelfth Night, parties, original spelling preserved:

Take 40 eggs and divide the whites from the yolks & beat them to a froth then work 4 pounds of butter to a cream & put the whites of eggs to it a Spoon full at a time till it is well work’d then put 4 pounds of sugar finely powdered to it in the same manner then put in the Youlks of eggs & 5 pounds of flower & 5 pounds of fruit. Add to it half an ounce of mace & nutmeg half a pint of wine & some frensh brandy. Two hours will bake it.

I’ll tackle that monster after the recession cuts us loose and I can afford five pounds of candied fruit (which wasn’t cheap even in Mistress Martha’s day). In the meantime, there’s pound cake. Don’t scoff. It may seem like a plain Jane amongst cakes: no fillings, no icing, no cup of cognac, no grating or chopping. But once you bite into a piece of good pound cake, it’s like when the librarian unpins her chignon and whips off her glasses: Oh my God! She’s a total babe!

Pound cake is deceptively simple. Mary Randolph’s 1824 cookbook
The Virginia Housewife
calls for a pound of butter, a pound of flour, a pound of powdered sugar, and twelve eggs. My mother’s version is a little more complex, but not difficult. It’s a beautiful cake, nut-brown on the outside, yellow as a daffodil inside. It’s the cake she makes for people who do nice things, people with family in the hospital, and funerals. In spring, when we can get fresh, local strawberries, she makes it for shortcake. If there are leftover pieces, she makes trifle, soaking it in sherry, slathering it with blueberries or peaches, layering it with custard. She bakes it like Wynton Marsalis plays the horn—gracefully, improvisationally. She has a recipe, but never looks at it. Here is Betty Gilbert Roberts’s Sour Cream Pound Cake.

Betty Gilbert Roberts’s Sour Cream Pound Cake

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened
3 cups white sugar
8 eggs, separated
1 cup sour cream
3 cups cake flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1½ teaspoons good vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Grease a tube pan and sugar the edges. Cream the butter and two cups of sugar until fluffy. While that’s beating, use a hand-mixer to whip the egg whites. Add the third cup of sugar and continue whipping until they form stiff peaks.

Add egg yolks, one at a time, to the butter and sugar. Beat well. Sift the flour, salt, and soda together. Add, alternating wet and dry ingredients, the flour mix and the sour cream. Mix well. Add the vanilla, then fold in the egg whites. Try not to eat the batter (it’s really good). Bake sixty to ninety minutes until a skewer comes out clean. Cool ten to fifteen minutes and turn out on a plate.

This cake is best savored with a glass of Kentucky whiskey or old Madeira or champagne, sitting in front of a bright fire, lying on the new grass in spring, or curled up on the sofa reading French ballads.

YANCEY’S
RED HOTS

By Wright Thompson From
The Oxford American

Though Wright Thompson’s usual subject is sports—he’s a senior writer for
ESPN The Magazine
and
espn.com
—as a Mississippian born and bred, musing about the finer points of southern food is a natural sideline.

W
hen people try to reassemble the broken pieces of 1950s Shelby, Mississippi, in their minds, they usually start with Saturday afternoon. Families filled the streets, as impossible as that sounds now. Folks came to town to buy provisions for the week, to get comics and floats for the kids, and maybe to bring home a sack of burgers for supper. They caught a movie, a showing of
High Noon
or
All About Eve
, and most of all, they heard the song of the hot-tamale man. His name was Yancey, and he pushed a cart. Even the kids playing in their backyards a few blocks away could hear his voice.

“Red hots!” he’d yell, parked over by the train depot, which still rattled with passengers and freight who thought the small town was worth the coming and going. “Get your red hots!”

The tamales simmered in the big, steaming silver pots he kept on the back of his cart. He only sold them on Saturday, and they were the best damn red hots in Bolivar County, maybe even Coahoma, too. Yancey lived not far from the depot, in a shotgun over at the Valley Gin Yard, where he worked for my family. He pushed a broom around the gin, and he took care of my uncle’s horses, and he did odd jobs for my grandparents.

For extra money, he’d spend hours behind his house, tending to the big iron cauldron, boiling pork and beef, then grinding it all together with garlic, layering in salt, chili, and cayenne, smooth and easy, the way a man just knows how to throw a baseball, twenty-two pounds of meal giving him 567 red hots to hawk at the depot on Saturday.

Yancey was old, even then, and in the 1950s, he found himself sick. He didn’t have any family, people remember, just people he’d worked for and people he’d fed. This is the story passed down in my family: One day, near the end, he called my grandmother over to his house. He wanted to give her something, he said. He didn’t have money, or a watch to pass along, or even a photograph they could keep.

He wanted her to have his hot-tamale recipe.

He dictated the ingredients and the instructions, and she wrote them down, in her neat, rolling cursive. Not long after,Yancey died. No one yelled “red hots!” downtown anymore, then, eventually, no one went downtown at all. The gin shut down. My grandfather died. My grandmother got Alzheimer’s and forgot everything, from her own children to the man with the cart. Then she died. Her friends died, too, and their children moved away. There aren’t many people left in Shelby, and even fewer who remember Yancey. Even his last name is hazy. Is it Searcey? Or Searcy? “Everyone is gone,” says eighty-five-year-old Jutta Ferretti, who was friends with my grandparents. “Everyone is gone.”

It seems as if Yancey never really existed at all, but I know that he did. I’m holding a four-by-six recipe card. I turn it over, feel the thick card stock, run my fingers along my grandmother’s blue script. Forgotten handwriting always gut-punches me; I can close my eyes and see a long-vanished hand moving over the page.

It’s all there. Four pounds of pork and four pounds of beef. Four buttons of garlic, and the salt and chili and cayenne. One pound of meal—or maybe meat, the formal “l” could be a “t”—makes twenty-four tamales, she writes, and twenty-two pounds makes 567. I try to imagine the moment when this recipe first jumped from Yancey’s mind to paper. What did he think would happen? Did he just want someone to know he’d been here?

I wonder what they must have tasted like, and I think about all the other little places in the Mississippi Delta that are gone, the tastes of my childhood, spots like Arnold’s Fried Chicken in my home-town of Clarksdale, and the Rebel Roost in Drew, and Campbell’s and Delta Kream in Tunica. Campbell’s is a Chinese buffet now. I can still taste the fried chicken every time I drive through the intersection of Desoto and MLK. Who was Arnold? Where did he go? Maybe old restaurants aren’t worth much thought, but they mean something to the people who look at the plywood windows and see a life turned to dust. Their loss does matter to the people who remember. Our food anchors us to a place.

My mother has never made Yancey’s recipe, and neither have I. It’s a lot of trouble, and we’re all so busy, you know. But, determined to try at least once, on a chilly Saturday morning not long ago, I go down to the local butcher and have him boil and grind the meat—cheating already—and head home to soak the corn husks. I consult my mother. I consult one of my best friends, John Currence, a James Beard Award-winning chef, and Cesar Valdivia, a friend who owns a Mexican restaurant. It takes a village. My wife and I start making the paste and carefully spread it on the husks. We boil them, and the first two come apart, but the third holds its form.

“It’s a tamale,” my wife says, as shocked as I.

We keep trying, and the fourth is better than the third, and the fifth is better than the fourth. By the end, the things on the plate look like hot tamales and taste something like ‘em, too. But they are not Yancey’s tamales. The soul is missing, the little steps, his little tricks, the things that make food alive and not a list of bloodless steps that can be passed along via e-mail.

The secrets to the tamales are in between the lines on the recipe card. They’re in the love, and in the expertise that comes only with practice. The recipe he passed down is vague, so vague it took a chef to fill in the blanks for me just to make it work, and I realize that the tamales lived in Yancey’s heart more than in his head. There is a truth in them that cannot be taught in words, something only learned from years of standing over a black iron pot behind the Valley Gin and staring down into the darkness.

Once it’s gone, the past cannot be preserved, even in faithful blue script, and once the man who yelled “red hots!” died, and the depot where he yelled it stopped seeing trains and eventually became a library, once the fryers went silent in Clarksdale and the griddle got cold in Drew, once the song of Saturday afternoon found itself living inside a recipe card on my kitchen island, well, it was gone, gone, gone.