April 25: Robert E. Lee Cake

Among my many cookbooks from Bonnie Slotnick's Cookbooks in New York is Housekeeping In Old Virginia.  It was a gift from my mother.  This book is a 1965 reprint of one originally copyrighted in 1879.  The editor, Marion Cabell Tyree describes it as "containing contributions from two hundred and fifty of Virginia's noted housewives, distinguished for their skill in the culinary art and other branches of domestic economy."  Referring to herself, in the third-person, in the preface, Mrs. Tyree offers that "if she, above all, shall succeed in making American homes more attractive to American husbands, and spare them a resort to hotels and saloons for those simple luxuries which their wives know not how to provide... [she] will feel amply repaid for all the labor her work has cost."  I love this stuff.

Ad on reverse of clipping

The best parts of old cookbooks are the clues left behind that tell you about the previous owner of the book.  Inside the pages of my practically pristine copy of Housekeeping In Old Virginia, I found the clipping of the original late 60's magazine advertisement selling the cookbook as part of a cookbook-of-the-month club.  The book seems to have hardly been used.  I guess that the previous owner ordered the book from the ad, but kept the clipping in case she wanted to return the book to get a refund of her $3.95.  I don't know the magazine title or issue, but there is a strange and wonderful ad for Saran Wrap on the back side of the page.
  
Housekeeping In Old Virginia contains many gems among the recipes; tips on butchering and the storage of meat without an ice house, and how to take quinine without tasting it.  Some recipes are confounding in their apparent simplicity and this is the case with the "Robert E. Lee" Cake, submitted by "Mrs. G."  The recipe in its entirety:

Twelve eggs, their full weight in sugar, a half-weight in flour.  Bake it in pans the thickness of jelly cakes.  Take two pounds of nice "A" sugar, squeeze into it the juice of five oranges and three lemons together with the pulp; stir it in the sugar until perfectly smooth; then spread it on the cakes, as you would do jelly, putting one above the other till the whole of the sugar is used up.  Spread a layer of it on top and on sides.

A compelling recipe challenge!  After determining, from other recipes in the book, that jelly cakes are round layer cakes.  I set about deciphering the term "nice A sugar."  From what I was able to find on the internet, "A" sugar was a term for white granulated sugar.  Three ingredients in a cake with eggs as the only leavening agent, then iced with a filling that is fruit juice and sugar?  Could "A" sugar in 1897 be fine like a caster sugar?  How much pulp?


The cake was no problem.  It smelled egg-y during the baking and it rose high and even.  The filling was less successful.  Instead of stirring by hand while wearing a late Victorian corset and layers of skirts in a hot southern kitchen with no air conditioning, I used a Kitchen Aid to stir.  It took quite a while to dissolve the sugar and then I had sugary citrus juice that would never cling to a cake enough to use as a filling between the

layers much less on the sides.  I added more sugar and it turned grainy.  I gently heated the juice and lost the bright citrus flavor while not improving the texture.

So, I started over on the filling.  I tried using more pulp to add some more structure and more pectin to the mix.  I sectioned the oranges and lemons and retained the juice with the pulp.  This helped, but the texture was still only as thick as pancake syrup.  It was still a little grainy.  I set about icing the cake, juggling the runny filling as fast as I could.  Much of the juice soaked into the cake, leaving a coating of citrus pulp on the outside.  The results are interesting.  The citrus flavor interacts nicely with the egg-laden cake.  The cake is moist and light with a thin, crunchy crust.  The texture of the filling is still strange and a little grainy.  If I make a "Robert E. Lee" cake again, I will make it with orange/lemon curd filling similar to Lemon Cheese Cake (see March 7).

A recipe for "Robert E. Lee" cake, out of a cookbook from Old Virginia demanded to be made for Confederate Memorial Day, April 26.  I, like most native southerners, have Confederate veterans in my family tree.  Papa's mother, Sarah Angeline Sells Page, was an diminutive adolescent at the time of the war and she was a spy for the Confederacy.  She only stood 4'11" as a full-grown woman and during the war she was dressed as a young child and sent across enemy lines with maps and communiques secreted inside the body of her doll.  On my father's side, Granna's grandfather, Jefferson Smith, was a sharpshooter (sniper) in General Gordon's brigade.

Despite the fascinating Confederate history I have in my bloodline, our family never commemorated Confederate Memorial Day.  I don't remember special parades, commemorative services at cemeteries or even any mention of the holiday.  The way I found out that April 26 is Confederate Memorial Day is that it is also my birthday.  On my 16th birthday, my mother checked me out of school early to go to take my driving test and get my license.  We arrived at the license office in East Atlanta on Moreland Avenue to find it closed!  Georgia state offices were closed for Confederate Memorial Day back in the 1980's.

For my birthday this year, my mother will be making a gluten-free version of my favorite cake, Chocolate-Pineapple Cake.  A Chocolate-Pineapple Cake is the creation of Mama Judy's sister, Daisy Allgood Babb (called Aunt Whick, mother to Pat, Betty, Jackie).  It is a four-layered, 1-2-3-4 cake with tangy pineapple curd between the layers and dark chocolate buttercream frosting on the outside.  My mother has made this family delicacy for me for almost every birthday.  I cannot wait for tomorrow.  We'll have both a gluten-free cake and a citrus-y experiment of a cake for my birthday celebration!

My mom with my birthday cake in Jackson, Mississippi at my first house (before I removed that terrible wallpaper)

Now, if someone could give me an early birthday present and help me clean all of the sticky fruit juice and sugar out of my kitchen...

Next Saturday:  Mexican Chocolate Cake

April 18: FDR's Favorite Black Nut Cake

Seventy years ago, on April 12, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia.  My Saturday Cake is from a book called "Hi-Ya Neighbor" written by Ruth Stevens.  Mrs. Stevens was the manager of the Warm Springs Hotel and wrote "Hi-Ya Neighbor" as a memoir of FDR's relationship to Warm Springs and a collection of menus and recipes that were the president's favorites.

Book jacket.  I have two autographed copies, collected from vintage book stores.

Aside from the fact that Mrs. Stevens ran the hotel where the "Secret Service men" stayed during visits, I have a family connection to the Warm Springs Hotel, the town of Warm Springs and to the Warm Springs Foundation.

Roosevelt sought treatment for the effects of Polio at Warm Springs in 1924.  The mineral-rich water there bubbles up at about 90 degrees, year round. A small resort had been built there on the site where centuries of Georgia residents, namely Creek Indians, had sought therapeutic treatment for injuries and disease.  Roosevelt was so impressed by the area and the positive results of his exercise in the warm water, that he helped launch The Warm Springs Foundation in 1927.  The Foundation is a large beautiful campus focused, to this day, on the treatment of victims crippling diseases and injuries.

My Granna, also born in 1927, worked at the Foundation as her first job.  Many teens in Meriwether county got their first jobs there as lifeguards, orderlies, tutors to juvenile patients or servers in the dining hall.  It was there that Granna met my grandfather, Eugene McDaniel and fell in love.  After my grandfather received his WWII draft notice, they eloped.  My Granna (16) had to lie about her age to the judge!

When Roosevelt passed away in 1945, his train departed from Warm Springs with nearly every citizen of the town paying their final respects track-side.  The crowd included my grandmother, pregnant with my father, her first child.  Granna later worked for Mrs. Stevens at the hotel coffee shop and my father would eat breakfast there on his way to school.  Mrs. Stevens would ask my dad if he had been a good boy and when he said "yes, ma'am!" she would give him a nickel.

The Warm Springs Hotel had a chicken coop out back and when a guest wanted fried chicken, the cook would step outside, wring a chicken's neck and then prep and fry it up.  Alice Waters has nothing on Ruth Stevens!

"Hi-Ya Neighbor" is an unusual compilation of anecdotes, gossip and memories.  Mrs. Stevens writes about her many encounters with FDR and about the great transformation he spearheaded in the town and the treatment facilities.  On the president's final day, she had prepared an enormous barbecue in his honor at the mayor's country home outside town.  Roosevelt never made it to the party.  On the menu that day was a 300-pound hog and various side dishes prepared by Stevens, along with this Black Nut Cake (because it was FDR's favorite).

Adding dredged nuts and raisins

Before the bath

The recipe is fascinating.  It calls for 2 quarts of shelled pecans, a pound and a half of raisins and "a wine glass full of sherry."  Mrs. Stevens's instructions dictate that the cake be baked in a steeple pan which, I admit, I had to Google.  A steeple pan is a tube pan; it makes sense since there's a "steeple" in the middle. 

The cake must be cooked on the stove, in a steam bath covered with a towel, for one hour, then it is moved to the oven to bake slow (330 degrees) for three hours. 

After an hour of steam

At the two-hour mark

THREE hours!

The batter with sherry, raisins and pecans smelled delicious during mixing.  I followed Mrs. Steven's instructions to the letter and cooked this cake a total of four hours, although I cannot fathom making this cake in Georgia in the days before air conditioning!

After about two hours in the oven, the cake looked done and felt done.  I feared that Mrs. Stevens was playing a prank in calling it a Black Nut Cake because it would surely turn out black as charcoal after another hour in the oven.  But, I stayed-the-course and helped myself to a glass of sherry to calm my nerves.

At a few minutes shy of three hours, I removed the cake from the oven and was more than a little concerned about the smell of burnt raisins that emerged with it.

The cake is actually quite good.  It has a sturdy crust, but the middle is very flavorful and moist. It is the consensus at our house that it is very good cake.  Keith says that it is the roasted nut flavor of the crust that makes it special.  I think that in the future, I will start testing the middle of the cake for doneness at two hours.  The raisins on the very outside do seem somewhat burnt.

For the eightieth anniversary of The Foundation, a special fund-raising effort was launched to fund renovations; plaques of dedication on the white columns of Georgia Hall were sold.  As a surprise for my grandparents, our family dedicated a column to them.



Next Saturday: Robert E. Lee Cake

April 11: Feud Cake

This is the first of my Saturday Cakes that I can actually eat.

I have tasted some filling and frosting along the way, but I am unable to eat any of the cakes because I am gluten-intolerant and, frankly, I blame Bill Clinton.

In June of 2005, I was one of the select U.S. Secret Service agents who had been trained to conduct intelligence advances for protectee travel overseas.  I was assigned to an advance team, armed with classified information and a satellite phone, and sent to Banda Aceh, Indonesia.  Former president Clinton and former president Bush were the special envoys from the United Nations to the areas ravaged by the Boxing Day Tsunami of 2004.  The Aceh region of Sumatra was the hardest hit area in the disaster.  The only building not leveled by the Tsunami was the concrete and cinder-block mosque in the center of Banda Aceh.  All the residents and shopkeepers posted newspaper pictures of the mosque standing tall above the flattened town.  Indonesia is, according to their government, the most Islamic country on earth and the survivors of the disaster took the sparing of the mosque as a sign or miracle.

My trip was to prepare for former president Clinton's six-month checkup on the recovery effort.  Our team was there for quite a while before Clinton's arrival and the entire trip had involved all-nighters for me conveying information back to headquarters in Washington.  In the wee hours before the former president was scheduled to arrive, I became violently ill with a stomach ailment.  Our team had been careful due to the unreliable hygiene of disaster area food preparation.  We used bottled water from the embassy to drink, brush our teeth and even wash our faces (because some infections come from opening one's eyes in infected water).  We had eaten MRE's, crackers & peanut butter that we had packed in our luggage, or the food from one restaurant that had been approved by embassy personnel.  I had eaten at the restaurant for supper and I think that it was the nasi goreng (Indonesian fried rice) that made me sick.  During the day of the protectee visit, I spent the day briefing our personnel on intelligence situations while at the same time downing re-hydration salts and trying to remain conscious in the equatorial heat.  Clinton visited a refugee camp in the hills where the survivors from low-lying Banda Aceh had been housed.

Tsunami refugee camp

Tsunami refugee camp

View from helicopter

After the visit, I had a 24-hour flight back to Atlanta with a 6-hour layover in Tokyo.  I don't remember driving home to Newnan from the Atlanta Airport or how I got up the stairs to my bedroom.  I spoke to my mom the next day and when she heard my voice, she told me that she was on her way (at the time, her car was in the shop, so she had to rent a car to drive to Newnan from Atlanta).  When she arrived, she took me directly to the hospital. 

After days of Gatorade, Jello and soda crackers, I was somewhat better, but not recovering as I should have.  I saw my physician in Atlanta for a follow-up.  The bacteria (foreign strains of Campylobacter and Salmonella) ) that had made me sick were clear from my system, but I was still weak and unable to digest.  After another week, my doctor started testing me for parasites and diseases that could be continuing to make me sick.  My blood tests revealed that even my liver and kidney function were affected.  Among the tests was one for Celiac  disease and it found two of the four Celiac antibodies present.  My doctor told me to eliminate all wheat, barley and rye from my diet.  After about a week of the new food restrictions, I felt well.  Every time I had started to feel better on the Gatorade/Jello regimen, I had eaten dry toast or soda crackers.  No wonder I continued to be sick!  All told, I was out of work for a month after my return to the states and I ended the month 25 pounds lighter.  I have since heard from other people whose Celiac or gluten-intolerance was triggered by tropical bacteria, including someone infected in Indonesia (in Bali, on vacation).

This Feud Cake recipe is from a cookbook called Talk About Good!, published by the Service League of Lafayette Louisiana in 1967.  The book was part of my Granna's collection.  The recipe called for 6 egg whites, but not the yolks.  In searching online for an explanation of the name of the cake, I found other recipes that call for the whole eggs.  It requires only 2 tablespoons of flour which I have replaced with Cup4Cup Gluten-Free Flour.  The rest of the cake is simply egg whites, sugar and pecan meal. It is frosted with sweetened whipped cream and decorated simply with pecans, so it went together easily and quickly.

This cake is delicious!  It is like a toasted-candied-pecan cake or a cake-y, creamy, pecan pie.  I am really pleased with the appearance of the pecans and the white/brown contrasting layers.  I will certainly make this cake again and perhaps I will try a recipe with the yolks to see what kind of difference that makes.

I am not sure why this recipe is called a Feud Cake.   There were a few stories online about the ownership of the recipe being source of the dispute.  I have decided that in my case, the feud is my own body fighting with the gluten...  and this cake settles the feud.

Next Saturday: President's (FDR) Favorite Black Nut Cake

April 4: Coconut Cake with Lemon Filling

April 2nd was the anniversary of Papa's birthday.  I wanted to bake his favorite cake this weekend, but I also felt strongly that I needed to make our family's traditional Easter cake: Coconut Cake with Lemon Filling.  I tried to remember Papa's favorite cake and couldn't.  He was always just happy with whatever Judy or Mom decided to make.  I asked my mom if she could remember his favorite cake.  She thought for a while and then said that, if asked, Papa would have named the favorite cake of whoever was asking.

Calvin Thomas Page and Buk on her first Easter

He was always and forever looking our for everyone else, especially his girls.  He had special nicknames for my mother (Dena) and me (Buk, rhymes with "boot") that the rest of the family still uses.  Papa never raised his voice, he never made a fuss.  He worked hard, always providing for his family, but also helping anyone who was down on their luck.

Papa was an electrician.  If you have ever been to a performance at the Fox Theatre in Atlanta, you have experienced his work.  The Moorish-style theatre was built in 1929 and as you sit in the audience you are surrounded by trompe l'oeil parapets, awnings, and minarets set against a desert sky.  As the house lights dim before a performance, the sun "sets" across the ceiling allowing small star  to twinkle in the night sky above you as you enjoy the show.  Papa installed those stars.  It is always difficult for me to watch a show or a movie there, because I like to watch Papa's stars instead. Visit the Fabulous Fox

So, I have chosen to bake the coconut cake that was one of Mama Judy's favorites and our Easter classic.  It is a three-layer 1-2-3-4 cake with lemon curd filling and my coconut buttercream frosting.  The key to the coconut flavor in the frosting is Coco Loco coconut cream.  Coco Loco is typically used as a base for pina coladas and can be found with the cocktail mixers at the grocery store.

While other people believe their Great-Grandfather or Grandfather hung the moon, we KNOW that our Papa hung the stars.

Happy Birthday, Papa!  Happy Easter!

Next Satruday: Feud Cake