December 13: Sunday Night Cake

My Sunday Night Cake on my newly-acquired, antique Dutch Kitchen (Hoosier)

During the summer, I found Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook (1961) at an antique mall near Concord, North Carolina.  Keith and I had driven Colin to Davidson college for a three-week Duke TIP program.  Duke TIP is a summer program for high-achieving youth in seventh grade and up.  It is essentially a "nerd camp," as any alumnus (including our Ian or Autumn) will proudly tell you.  This was Colin's first year at Duke TIP and he selected a course in architecture.  He had a fantastic time and made friends  with whom he shares common interests.

One of those friends is having her Bat Mitzvah on this Saturday in Columbia, South Carolina and has invited Colin to the big bash.  Keith's parents live in Columbia, so it will be a great chance to visit them for the holidays while giving Colin a chance to party with his TIP-ster chums.  Since we have been watching all of the James Bond films lately Colin is pretty fascinated with how debonair Bond can be.  Colin has elected to strike a James Bond image and will be wearing a white dinner jacket ensemble to the party.

Amy Vanderbilt is best known for her Complete Book of Etiquette (1952).  This cookbook was a great find for a myriad of reasons, not the least being the illustrations by Andy Warhol.  Warhol started out as a commercial illustrator and lived by selling his pen-and-ink illustrations before his first gallery show.  He was well-known for his illustrations, some in ink, some colored, of shoes in advertisements.  He was also known for similar illustrations of cats and there is an urban-art-history legend that he and his mother owned more than forty cats and that every one was named Sam.


In the 1980's, Mom and I visited my grandfather, Blaine, in Cherokee North Carolina. We stayed at one of the classic, kitschy motels on the reservation, The Pink Motel.  In the coffee shop of the lobby hung an original Andy Warhol painting of Mick Jagger.  What was THAT doing THERE?  It is an absolute mystery.  I will never forget the day that Mom and I first saw it just hanging there in a roadside tourist motel.  Blaine made some inquiries to try to satisfy our curiosity and the only explanation he could divine was a story about the owner of the motel being given the painting in payment of a debt.

Less mystifying to me, yet still curious is the name, Sunday Night Cake.  I Googled the term and found that virtually any cake - chocolate, cinnamon, etc. - could bear the label.

Amy Vanderbilt's Sunday Night Cake is two layers of cake flavored with almond extract and sprinkled with cognac after baking.  Between the layers is an almond custard and the frosting is made from almond paste and egg whites.  I suspect that in the style of The Art of Cooking and Serving (see October 10, Molasses Cake), a cake on Sunday night would be for an "informal" dinner, possibly planned and prepared by the man of the house, for the purposes of entertaining drop-in guests.  In Ms.Vanderbilt's recipe for Chicken a la King she even specifies such a gathering.

These time-tested recipes fit into almost any menu from brunch to midnight supper.  I like them especially for Sunday-night supper or for an unplanned Sunday luncheon when I suddenly decide it would be fun to have guests. (pg. 179)

Is this delicious but complicated and time-consuming recipe what constitutes "informal ease" in the Vanderbilt home?  Perhaps it is just rude of me to ask.  I suppose that should consult and etiquette guide to find out.

I think it is a touch of irony that in Warhol's work of the 1960's and 70's that he is best known for elevating the familiar products (Coca-Cola, Campbell's Soup) found in every American home to the status of art.

Perhaps the Vanderbilts did eat canned soup and drink Cokes, too.  But judging from this cake, their Sunday nights were a lot more complicated and elegant than ours.

Next Weekend:  My Gluten-Free Pound Cake

October 3: Lemon Cake with Lemon Buttercream

Maggie Angeline Page Hill, wearing Blaine's Airborne Wings on a suit made by Mama Judy
in her engagement photo for the Atlanta newspapers.  The suit matched her blue eyes.

This weekend, my cake is one of my own recipes.  I developed this recipe for a Lemon Layer Cake with a tangy, buttercream frosting years ago when I was entertaining the idea of having a cupcake and tea shop upon my retirement from the Secret Service.  I have made cupcakes from the recipe for birthday parties, showers, and I even made hundreds of them for a fundraiser for Georgia Shakespeare.  It is an absolute favorite of everyone in our family.

Maggie with my mom at the beach

Any dessert with lemon has always been a favorite in our family and perhaps that is because it was a favorite flavor of Mama Judy who did the baking when my mother and her mother were growing up.  Tuesday the 6th is the 95th anniversary of my grandmother, Maggie's birth.

Mama Mag never did much cooking, but she made delicious cornbread and she loved to eat.  She always asked to go to restaurants that served the things she loved but never got at home; Judy cooked traditional southern dishes and baked perfect southern desserts.  But frog's legs, fried chicken livers, raw oysters and fried oysters all had to be enjoyed by Maggie when she went out to eat.  She had eclectic taste in foods and no fear of trying new things.

Maggie was not a traditional grandmother to me.  She lived with Mama Judy and Papa and they filled the "grandparent" roles when I visited.  Mama Mag was more like a playmate to me.  We sat on the floor and played  card games like Crazy 8's or Battle using sticks of Fruit Stripe chewing gum to place our bets.  She let me play in her makeup and with her costume jewelry.  She would sing and clap her hands to songs on the radio or music played by bands at the mall.  When I was a teenager, she would joke with me like she probably did with her girlfriends as teens.  We would be driving down the street and she would see a punk with a mohawk, or a hobo, and say to me "well, there goes your last chance..." then she would start to roll the window down to call him over.

In 1940, she was pictured in the Atlanta Journal at a jitterbug dance contest in Grant Park.  She was one of the contestants and she kept the newspaper clipping pressed in the family bible along with other flat keepsakes like her school diplomas, blood donation awards and corsages from who-knows-what occasion.  My mother turned the clipping into a collage for me as a reminder of my uninhibited and fun-loving grandmother.  Maggie always lived in-the-moment and didn't really care what people thought (much to her mother's chagrin in her rebellious youth).

"The sky's the limit and there ain't no sky" reads the caption from the Atlanta Journal

 Maggie was the luckiest person I have ever known, probably because she did live optimistically in the moment and she believed that she would win.  She won every contest or raffle she entered.  When I was in high school, on Friday nights, I would go with Maggie to weekly bingo at the retirement high-rise where she lived.  Friday night bingo with my grandmother?  Maybe Maggie was right to think that those undesirable fellows on the side of the road could have been my "last chance" at getting a date.  She won bingo every Friday.  The other residents hated to see her coming, I'll bet, because she not only won the games but usually the door prize raffle, too.

I never won a bingo game there, but I did win the door prize one night.  It was the first thing I had ever won.  The prize was a cake, donated by a local bakery for Branan Towers bingo night.

Maggie on our Florida road trip, 1987

Probably since the place was opened in the 1960s, Maggie had always wanted to visit Disney World, but she had never had an opportunity to go.  In the summer before I left for college, I took Mama Mag on a road trip to Orlando, just the two of us.  We did everything she most wanted to see:  the killer whale show at Sea World (she was disappointed when we didn't get splashed), Disney World (she loved the runaway mine train) and we walked around the world at Epcot.  Our main destination at Epcot was Germany so that she could enjoy weinerschnitzel and a beer at the Biergarten like the ones she remembered from her life in Germany.

Maggie died in 1994.  Hospitalized from respiratory failure, but determined and feisty to the end, she passed away after removing her own respirator tube when Mom and I stepped out of her hospital room for a few minutes.

Maggie had no fear, lots of memories and always expected to win and I'll bet you a stick of Fruit Stripe that she would have loved this Florida citrus cake for her birthday.

Next Saturday: Molasses Cake

September 26: Hummingbird Cake

I am not sure why I've never made a Hummingbird Cake before.  It's a very popular cake in recipe books from the southern U.S.  There is much speculation about how the cake got its name and how it became popular in the South since bananas, cinnamon and pineapple are not native.  Much of the lore regarding the name comes from the sweetness and fruitiness of the cake being sweet enough to attract a hummingbird.  It seems like the cake's origin was from Jamaica (hence the tropical fruits) but the recipe proliferated after being featured in Southern Living magazine in the 1970's.

This recipe is from The Best of Georgia Farms cookbook, a collection of recipes from the Market Bulletin published by the Georgia Department of Agriculture.  It is an oil based cake, like a carrot cake, so it is moist and tender.  This Hummingbird Cake is far superior to a carrot cake (even mine, see March 28) because of the depth of flavor from the bananas.  Plus, there's never anything wrong with a cake containing both pecans and cream cheese frosting.  Perhaps it's called a Hummingbird Cake because it goes SO FAST.

My lack of experience with a Hummingbird Cake is even more baffling when I consider that it is my namesake cake.  Not a Samantha cake, Hummingbird Cake.  In Cherokee tradition, your mother's father names you, and in most respects the name is symbolic and not used on official documents like a birth certificate.  My mother's father, Blaine, named me Walelu (wah-leh-lu), hummingbird, at my birth.  I loved that I was named for a bird so quick and beautiful.  But the best attribute of hummingbirds, I think, is their bravery.  A hummingbird will fearlessly attack a much bigger bird, even an eagle, if its nest or family is in peril.  I know that bravery, like my name, comes from Blaine.

My full-blooded Cherokee grandfather was born on the reservation in 1915.  He was educated in a school on the reservation, run by the US government that kept children separated from their families not just by the content of the curriculum, but also by a tall fence.  His mother, Luzene Sequoyah Hill, had herself been removed from her family and shipped off to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania for her childhood education.  The government removed her from her family, changed her hair, her language and her clothes to train her to be a domestic for a white family.  Remembering the pain of her own loss and homesickness made her walk down the mountain every day to stand outside the fence of the reservation school to watch over her own children.

Blaine 

There is a long and proud tradition in Native America of volunteering for the U.S. armed forces.  Blaine followed this tradition and a family legacy; he enlisted for the U.S. Army in 1938 and joined the 82nd Airborne paratroopers.  He fought in World War II and returned home.  He also fought in the Korean Conflict with the 101st Airborne and logged over 100 jumps in his career.  Back home, he and another Cherokee veteran, in full uniform,  would be pictured in newspapers nationwide as they were turned away from voting in the state of their birth, North Carolina.  Even though indians received US citizenship and the right to vote in 1924, many states refused to allow them to vote.

Maggie and Blaine

Blaine met my grandmother, Maggie, in Cherokee, NC when her family was there on vacation in 1945.  During their courtship, my grandmother and her best friend, who was also dating a soldier, branded their beaux's initials on their thighs (at stocking-top level) using the blazing red tips of matches.  At the time, in Fulton County, GA, interracial marriages were against the law.  So, after being refused in Atlanta, Blaine and Maggie drove to Lawrenceville, the county seat of Gwinnett County, to be married by an agreeable judge after hours.  My mother, their only child, was born the following year.  As a part of Blaine's military career, their little family lived in Mainz, Germany for a time while my mother was in elementary school.  Blaine and Maggie stayed together for as long as their clash of cultures and family pressures would allow.  After returning from Germany, the marriage ended and Blaine moved away from Atlanta.

Blaine, Mom and Maggie

Split oak baskets dyed with butternut or black walnut foraged by Blaine

My mother saw Blaine only sporadically as she grew up.  He would come to town to visit her and bring her gifts.  He never stayed in Atlanta long.

After I was born, he would continue to make visits to town at least once a year.  He lived for a time in Chicago, IL, Nashville, TN, and on the Cherokee reservation.  Whenever he visited, he brought us fantastic gifts; occasionally, fancy, store-bought items, along with items he created using traditional Cherokee methods.  When I was about seven years old, he brought me an umbrella; navy blue with a gold-tone, plastic handle studded with plastic cabochon "jewels."  I had never seen such a fancy umbrella in all of my life and I was afraid to use it in case I ruined or lost it.  It made me feel like a Victorian lady, as did the pairs of gloves he brought me on several occasions.

Blaine was an artist, a terrific wood carver.  He made carvings of animals that he sold at craft stores in Cherokee.  He made an indian-head-carved violin for my mother who played violin in high school.  When I was in fourth grade, he made me a dulcimer, and I learned to play it from a Foxfire artist in the mountains of North Georgia.  When I was in the fifth grade, he visited and brought me a Cherokee blowgun he had made himself.  The gun was made from straight, hollow, river cane and he had made darts complete with rabbit fur fletching.  He showed me how to use the blow gun using a target painted on a cardboard box in our back yard.  Blaine gave us split-white-oak baskets using oak and natural dyes (blood root, yellow root, butternut & black walnut) which he hiked into the mountains to gather.  Also, he would bring us sacks of black walnuts that he had gathered in the woods, or trout he had just caught that morning in the mountains.

Some of Blaine's animals:  swan, crane, wolf, buffalo and an incongruous giraffe.

Dulcimer and violin

Almost every time Blaine came to visit me and Mom, Maggie seemed to know somehow that he had been there to see us.  For years, she would ask on the day of his visit or in the days that followed, "have you heard from Blaine?"  Maggie never remarried, and I believe she always carried a torch for her ex-husband.  Blaine died in 1992.  Maggie hadn't asked about him in a long time by then, but shortly after he passed, she asked my mom if he had died.

I am surrounded by Blaine's tangible gifts of art and the best thing he made, my mom, the artist.  Lately, I have been thinking about news stories on marriage equality,voting rights, racism, patriotism, and true bravery.  I have trying to rely more on the power of instinct. And I have been thinking about my grandfather who named me after a brave and beautiful bird.

Next Saturday:  Lemon Cake