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