Anne Byrn on Cake

In the South, cakes are our love language. We bake to celebrate birthdays, reunions, potluck dinners, and even elections. Now, we bake for therapy, especially through the holidays. 

Words by Anne Byrn | Photos by Rinne Allen

“Everyone in the neighborhood knew who made the best caramel or coconut or chocolate cake, and at community dinners those prized creations were the first to disappear.”
—
John Egerton,
“Southern Food” (1987)

Janie Cheney’s Sticky Lemon Cake

I was having lunch with an old friend at Chez Fonfon in Birmingham a couple of years ago, before James Beard Award-winning pastry chef Dolester Miles retired. On display, for the entire restaurant to see, was her sleek and captivating coconut-pecan layer cake. Several slices had been removed, revealing intricate layering inside, and I made a mental note to order lightly and save room for that cake.  

If the kitchen is the heart of a home, then surely cakes are its long-term memory. They reach into the past and connect us to loved ones. They grant bragging rights and turn the ordinary lunch into an occasion. 

In the South, life is punctuated by caramel, coconut, devil’s food, red velvet, or 1-2-3-4 cakes at birthdays, baptisms, weddings, potlucks, and funerals. Some people get so good at baking one particular kind of cake that they become associated with it and are asked repeatedly to bring it to get-togethers. Occasionally, these well-intended efforts snowball into a side hustle selling cakes at church or the beauty salon, or they blossom into a serious seven-layer mail-order business like Caroline’s of Spartanburg, South Carolina, or Dean’s Cake House of Andalusia, Alabama.

The Fine Art of Caramel Icing

When I researched my book American Cake, historian William Woys Weaver explained to me that the Pennsylvania Dutch culture was once divided into cake people and pie people. Cake people baked with the lightest flour, let eggs come to room temp for better volume, and knew intuitively when cake was done. Pie people, on the other hand, were too busy for such nuances and had work to do.

I am a cake person. A slice of chocolate cake intrigues me, challenges me, and cheers me up. But my husband would rather have a slice of peach pie, and my mother’s favorite dessert was warm chocolate pie with a tall meringue. She seldom baked layer cakes unless there was a birthday or my father begged her to make his favorite blackberry jam cake with caramel icing at Christmas. Her idea of cake was a big pan of Coca-Cola cake that fed all the cousins. 

One day at the bridge table she came across a quick version of caramel icing and couldn’t wait to call me and share the news. It called for brown sugar, which meant you could skip caramelizing white sugar. Not being from the Mississippi Delta, where caramel icing is religion, she saw a faster, more forgiving recipe that wouldn’t set up too quickly on the cake as a godsend. If you’ve ever attempted making it the old-fashioned way, with two skillets and a litany of Catholic prayers, you know that caramel icing hardens like plaster. You can’t smooth over imperfections with just another swipe. Your only recourse is to chisel it off, reheat it gently on the stove, and start over.

But cake bakers are patient people. It takes a lot of love to spend an entire afternoon in the kitchen making one recipe over and over again. The boozy Lane cake bedecked with maraschino cherries is a time-consumer that requires hours of chopping pecans and raisins, baking layers, and then simmering the bourbon-infused filling. And some cooks insist on finishing it off with a fluffy, finicky white boiled icing. That cake was popularized in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and is the official cake of Alabama. But across the state line, cooks in Americus, Georgia, claim it as well. It is President Jimmy Carter’s favorite cake. 

A “cheese’’ cake spread with lemon curd is also revered in that same region and baked rarely elsewhere in the South. A chocolate roll, filled with whipped cream, is a hyper-regional favorite in Sumter, South Carolina. That roll, chocolate marble cake, sour cream coffee cake, and apple cake were all Jewish recipes that expanded the South’s largely British and French cake heritage.

Pound Cake is Serious Business

It’s old, it’s British, and early cooks didn’t require a recipe because it was made from a pound each of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs. All you needed was the weight of your eggs and you added the same amount of everything else. Over time we’ve embellished pound cake with sour cream, enriched it with cream cheese, flavored it with lemon and 7Up, and added brown sugar and chocolate. Without wheat flour, we’ve baked it with rice flour. With a bountiful crop of sweet potatoes, we’ve mashed and folded them in with cinnamon. For the holidays, we eschew ordinary tube pans and pour the batter into something fancier with loads of drama. 

The hidden meaning of dense, rich pound cake was apparent in 1950s segregated Alabama, where pound cake had a role in social justice. Two months before Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, Georgia Gilmore had just left her job as a cook at the National Lunch Company when she stepped onto a crowded city bus and dropped her fare into the cash box. The driver told her to get off the bus and enter through the back door. When she stepped off, the bus sped off. Gilmore then turned civil rights activist the best way she knew how. She organized Black women to bake and sell pound cakes, sweet potato pies, and fried fish dinners, and the money they raised helped pay for alternative transportation to and from work for people who took part in a 381-day boycott of Montgomery’s segregated bus system from 1955 to 1956. 

You don’t mess around with pound cake.

Mrs. Mosal’s White Fruitcake

Love It or Hate It, Fruitcake Stirs Up Memories

Author Eugene Walter of Mobile, Alabama, wrote of his fruitcake memories, which were published in the cookbook The Happy Table of Eugene Walter after his death in 1998. He recalled how, during Prohibition, his grandmother visited the doctor for a prescription for brandy, which she used to make fruitcakes. Fruitcake lovers, he said, belonged to one of two camps — those who loved “insanely red cherries for color and those who loathed them.”

Being in the kitchen when a fruitcake is baking or a pound cake is still warm to the touch — these are like no other sensory experiences. Fifty years later, if I smell the magical alchemy of butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla in the oven, I sense a celebration is about to happen or a holiday approaching. I hear my mother’s voice.  She’s talking to her sister Louise and has pulled the telephone cord clear across the kitchen, tucked the handset between her left ear and shoulder, and is wrapping fruitcakes with red cellophane paper while she gabs.

Baking Cake Even for a Presidential Election

Cakes and elections used to have a close association, too. After the Revolutionary War, when all the [white male] voters had finished casting their ballots on Election Day, locals celebrated with slices of a spice-and-fruit-filled Election Cake baked large enough to feed an entire town. That tradition vanished over the centuries, but maybe it’s time to resurrect it. We could all use a little cake therapy in the aftermath of this year’s election season.

Oregon poet Ginger Andrews calls the baking and sharing of cake “therapeutic”:

“I wasn’t going to bake the cake
now cooling on the counter, but I found a dozen eggs tipped
sideways in their carton behind a leftover Thanksgiving Jell-O dish.
There’s something therapeutic about baking a devil’s food cake,
whipping up that buttercream frosting,
knowing your sisters will drop by and say Lord yes
they’d love just a little piece.’’

— from Down on My Knees by Ginger Andrews

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This story is featured in Issue No. 9