The Rake Magazine

Tag: cake

  • Sometimes All the Time

    Jonah’s
    throat was sore, lately. It hadn’t bothered him in the last couple
    days, but Jonah still waited for the pain to resurface, so that whenever
    he swallowed it would feel like swallowing sand, like it had for the
    past month or so. This waiting made him impatient, but the painkillers
    he took somewhat tempered his anxiety. Right now he had a eucalyptus
    lozenge in his mouth, and he bit down on it – not all the way through,
    just so his molars sunk in halfway.

    There
    were eleven tables, and he placed the salt-and-pepper shakers and the
    miniature Tabasco bottles from each on his cocktail tray. Becky followed
    behind him, blowing out the tea lights (too hard: wax fanned out against
    the sides of the candleholders) and wiping the tables with a bleach-soaked
    rag. In the office – a desk and laptop behind a velveteen curtain
    – their manager settled the credit cards and listened to vintage rock
    radio, the songs muffled and heartfelt through the drape, and Jonah
    and Becky knew that really they were actually alone.

    "I’m
    coming over later, still," Becky said.

    "Yeah
    that’s cool," said Jonah. "If you want." He paused at a four-top
    by the front windows, and looked up and out over Lake Calhoun, trying
    to find one of the half dozen or so constellations he could recognize,
    but it was too cloudy, or maybe the lights from the bars and condominiums
    in Uptown Minneapolis were too bright and distracting, or the Percocets
    he’d taken dampened the stars like they did his feelings (physical,
    emotional, and otherwise), or maybe the stars tonight were dimmer than
    usual, farther away and burning out. He scribbled something on a guest
    check that later, when he tries to re-write it into his astronomy journal,
    he will be unable to read.

    "I
    want," Becky said. She slid into a booth and began to polish silverware.

    She
    had two blond streaks in her hair, interwoven with the black. Nights
    they spent together, Jonah guessed what her original color had been,
    but Becky wouldn’t tell him. Also – and this was maybe more important,
    at least to Jonah – she couldn’t come during sex, or at least not
    with him, or at least not yet; he asked her why she wanted to sleep
    with him so often, why she was so insistent, but she wouldn’t tell
    him that, either.

    "Okay,
    then," Jonah said. "I’ll call you after Jenna’s gone, I guess."

    He
    sat down next to her, making sure the outsides of their legs touched
    under the table, but Becky scooted away.

    Jenna,
    his friend, ex-girlfriend, possibly hopefully girlfriend-soon-to-be,
    was coming tonight to pick up their dog because Jonah worked longer
    hours on weekends. He did not like this arrangement: the time he spent
    away from Rabbit was confusing and remarkably un-linear. Tomorrow, Friday,
    Jonah will wake up the same time as usual, but realizing his dog is
    not there needing to be let out, he will fall back asleep, and in the
    two days after, his sleep will drift later and later into the morning,
    and the events of his day will be without the regular, nearly grammatical
    punctuation of walking Rabbit. Which is why tonight he was thinking
    about trying to convince Jenna to move back in with him.

    "What
    time will that be?" Becky asked. She wiped a pair of wet spoons with
    a black napkin.

    "The
    usual time. I don’t know. I just thought I should tell you, is all."

    "You
    shouldn’t have," Becky said.

    She
    was wearing a pair of his soccer socks – they came up to the middle
    of her thighs, the Puma logo stretched around her kneecaps – and Jonah
    thought it was strange how easily and comfortably she’d been able
    to insinuate herself into his life. That was, actually, the most fascinating
    aspect of their now-month-long relationship: its normalcy. After only
    a couple nights together, symbiotic sleeping positions and synchronized
    wakings had been established. Jonah was impressed with himself for this
    because he considered Becky to be a little too good for him. Not because
    she was too pretty, though maybe also for that reason, but because she
    seemed so sad, and wise in her sadness, (and pretty in her sadness),
    and for him melancholy trumped beauty: it was a sort of barometer for
    how human one was. And Becky couldn’t even say why she was on the
    anti-depressants she was on – she’d tried explaining several times
    and just given up – and this intrigued Jonah and turned him on a little.

    Right
    now, he loved the way she stopped rolling silverware, and brushed crumbs
    from the booth to the floor, hair hanging forward in a way that exposed
    the sparrow she had tattooed below her left ear.

    "What’s
    wrong?" he asked.

    "Nothing."

    "What’s
    nothing?"

    "Nothing’s
    this big void in the universe. Scientists aren’t sure if it actually
    exists or not, but it does. I feel it a lot."

    Jonah
    coughed, and then spit into a beverage napkin – candy lozenge shards,
    mostly – which he folded and put in his apron.

    "Is
    your throat okay?" Becky moved closer to him. "I hope it’s not
    strep. I don’t have the energy to get sick right now."

    "I’m
    fine, I think," he said, taking a pill from his pocket.

    "I
    can get you more, if you want," she said. "It might be generic this
    time, but basically the same. I’ll ask my guy. Then I’ll bring it
    over tonight, if you’ll let me over. Whatever. I’m hot. You’re
    dumb."

    Later,
    after the chairs are all flipped over onto the tables and the lights
    turned out, after the manager unlocks the restaurant doors so they can
    leave, and Jenna come and Jenna gone and Becky and Jonah in bed together,
    the night crew will come to sweep and mop and bleach the floors.

  • Citrus Sensation

    Some people have gone out of their way to make a perfectly good Fuji apple smell and taste like a grape. They call it a Grapple. There are also those who feel that plums should taste like apricots and that apricots should taste like plums, hence the booming pluot and aprium markets. Needless to say, when I first heard of Meyer lemons, I assumed they were a breed of fancy Frankenlemons created at some technologically advanced Meyer Institute of Frilly Fruit. Like a fool, I snubbed them.

    But they were hard to ignore, as the “Meyer lemon” moniker began popping up on menus everywhere. If chefs were going to pedigree a dish with this name, I figured this citrus was worth a try. It was only when I tasted the faint orangey sweetness and breathed in the floral scent that I understood what a contribution this fruit was.

    In 1901, a man named Frans Meijer left Amsterdam for America, where he became Frank Meyer. Working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he traveled the world in search of new plants to introduce to his adopted homeland. During a trip to China, Meyer found a common potted ornamental plant that bore a small citrus fruit resembling a cross between a lemon and an orange. While the plant had most likely been cultivated for over four hundred years, this year marks its centennial in America, having been introduced here in 1908 as the Meyer lemon. (Intriguingly, while traveling the Yangtze on a riverboat on a subsequent trip to Asia, Meyer fell overboard and drowned under circumstances that the USDA still notes as “a mystery and source of speculation.”)

    Meyer lemons, which are available from November to April, never hit the big time as a commercially viable fruit product. A virus nearly wiped out the trees in the 1940s. Even though a hardier Meyer Improved strain was developed, the fruits remained thin-skinned, and too tender and juicy to withstand rigorous commercial handling and shipping without costly waste. And yet, find me a food that has been deemed lacking in mass appeal, and I’ll show you the next great ingredient with chef-appeal.

    Alice Waters and her ilk regarded this small zesty fruit as a gem, and the rest is all talk shows and cookbooks. Chefs and home cooks have found it to be an amiable companion to many dishes that a regular lemon might overwhelm. Although no one really knows, it’s the suspected cross with a mandarin orange that gives this citrus a new depth of flavor. Personally, I can’t help but think of cardamom whenever I cut into a Meyer.

    To get over the shame of my initial snubbing, I threw myself into a wholehearted culinary exploration of this fruit. Starting simply, I squeezed a tiny section onto a Malpeque oyster and discovered a new balance of coppery, salty, tart, and sweet. Marmalades and baked goods made with Meyers were beautiful, but almost too easy, too girl-next-door. So I tossed zest into pasta with salmon; I braised chicken and artichokes with whole quarters; I made a zippy version of gremolata, which I proceeded to eat on pork and beef—and then bread and anything leftover in the fridge.

    In the end, what I have added to my larder is a flavor that is tart but not sharp, luscious but edgy, and able to play to both savory and sweet dishes. Hardly worthy of a snub.

  • When Harry Met Betty

    One of life’s great truths—one that we desperately seek to avoid with proverbs and catechisms and even magazine articles—is that beneath its surface lies complexity. Our beloved fictions of heroes and villains crumble with scrutiny, leaving only convolution, shifting meanings, and unstable realities. The same is true of things. Even the simplest object has its hidden history of longing, love, and despair. Take, for example, cake. Chiffon cake.

    Ask someone who lived through the 1950s to name the icons of that era, and chances are that—along with the ’57 Chevy, Lucy and Ricky, and the cul-de-sac rambler—chiffon cake will make their list. The recipe was introduced by General Mills in 1948 with a major marketing blitz that featured Betty Crocker, another 1950s icon. Betty, of course, is the fictional marketing persona invented in the 1920s by Marjorie Child Husted, a General Mills executive who sometimes posed as her creation. With Betty’s help, chiffon became a nationwide sensation. Billed as “the first really new cake in a hundred years,” thanks to its “mystery ingredient,” chiffon was light and fluffy like angel food cake, yet also rich and moist like butter cake, and it rapidly became a favorite of housewives from Syracuse to Oceanside.

    Even today, the towering tube cake conjures a Kodachrome image of Mother, in lipstick and swing skirt, offering up love via food: the idealized feminine of mid-century America.
    But just as the post-war feminine mystique had its dark, unspoken places, so, too, had the chiffon cake. The real mystery lurking beneath its lemony glaze is not a secret ingredient, but the secret life of its reclusive inventor: the appropriately named Harry Baker.

    The shorthand version of his history, repeated in a thousand cookbooks, notes that the insurance-salesman-turned-baker invented the cake in Los Angeles in 1927. He baked his chiffon cakes in his apartment kitchen in the Windsor Square neighborhood and sold them to the glamorous Brown Derby restaurant, where they pleased the palates of Hollywood’s studio stars. In 1947, Baker sold his closely guarded recipe to General Mills for an undisclosed sum—“because,” as one General Mills publication quotes him, “I wanted Betty Crocker to give the secret to the women of America.”
    The complete version of Harry Baker’s life is more complicated, and you won’t find it in any cookbook, or anywhere else for that matter. “Just to mention his name was forbidden,” said his granddaughter, Sarah Baker, who is an attorney in Portland, Oregon. “I remember, maybe about 1964, my grandmother had a tea party for one of her sisters,” she recalled. “I had gone down to the kitchen to help her. She had her back to me, getting dishes out of a china cabinet, when I asked her, ‘Whatever happened to Grandfather Baker?’
    “She whirled around faster than I knew she could move, looked at me absolutely furiously, and said, ‘We don’t talk about him.’ ”

    Although it was wildly popular in the 1950s, the chiffon cake had been figuratively gathering dust for decades by the time I discovered the recipe in the late 1990s. It was the tail end of the glorious dot-com boom years and I, a hopeless liberal-arts kid from way back, had landed a job, mainly out of curiosity, at a prestigious design firm in downtown Minneapolis. Visions of John Cheever and Darrin Stephens launched my wife and me into a sardonic but passionate craze for everything retro-1950s. Dressed for cocktails, she would greet me at the door after work, martinis in hand; during one such happy hour, while browsing in our 1956 edition of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book, I stumbled upon the recipe for chiffon.
    The job, the dress, the quest for fifties kitsch: forgotten. But my Betty still falls open to the creased and batter-spattered pages with the step-by-step photo directions for chiffon cake because, symbolism aside, it makes a truly splendid dessert.
    Before chiffon, there had been but two types of cake. Foam cakes, like angel food, contain no shortening and rely on eggs for leavening; while butter cakes rise with baking powder. Chiffon combines the two, relying on both eggs and baking powder, and, the clincher, adds Harry Baker’s secret ingredient: vegetable oil (or, as it was called in those days, “salad oil”—another General Mills product, as it happens). The recipe calls for seven eggs. Their yolks are mixed with flour, sugar, leavening, and the oil to make a batter, which is folded into their whipped-hard whites.

    The result delivers on every one of Betty Crocker’s promises: Chiffon is simple, virtually foolproof. Light, moist, rich. And above all, “glamorous.” The lemon version (the only one I make) speckles starry citrus against a snowy sky of sweet, voluptuous crumb. Never dry, never cloying, never dull, it is, in short, the perfect cake. And the rave reviews earned by my first attempt brought me back to it time and again. Members of our extended family bring pies to Thanksgiving dinner. I make chiffon.

    I had been an enthusiastic baker of the cake for some time when one day, drooling through back issues of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, I chanced upon an article on chiffon by food writer and Joy of Cooking contributor Stephen Schmidt. If you’ve read Cook’s Illustrated, you’ll already know that Schmidt tinkered exhaustively with the original Betty Crocker recipe to end up with something just a little better. (So he claims. I stick with the original.)

    What caught my eye, however, was a sidebar article about Harry Baker. Schmidt repeated the standard biography: insurance salesman, 1927 discovery, service to the stars, etc. But he also uncovered some new details. For one thing, he noted that Baker, during his Hollywood heyday, shared his apartment “with his aging mother.” And the sale of the recipe to General Mills took on a new twist in Schmidt’s telling: “Having been evicted from his apartment, and fearing memory loss, the usually reclusive Baker trekked uninvited to Minneapolis to sell his recipe,” he wrote.

    Every one of us is blessed with curiosity, and there are those among us who can keep it at bay. I’m not one of them. Taken together, these few scraps of information hinted at a story. One thing led to another, and eventually it turned out that I spent five years, on and off, chasing the elusive Hollywood inventor of my beloved chiffon cake.

    In 1923, Paramount released Hollywood, a silent film that follows the misadventures of Angela Whitaker, a hapless girl from “Centerville” who can’t land a film part in the land of dreams come true. The film is laced with nearly eighty cameo appearances by virtually every star of the silent era: Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, Pola Negri, Cecil B. DeMille, Will Rogers.

    That same year, tycoons who owned the Hollywoodland Real Estate erected an enormous sign to advertise their corporation. Years later, Peg Entwistle, a real-life Angela Whitaker, would throw herself off the four-story “H.” Eventually, the Hollywood chamber of commerce toppled the last four letters of the sign and it’s been an icon of American dreams ever since.

    1923 also saw the arrival of Harry Baker in Hollywood. He, too, came from Ohio. He was forty years old. Behind him he’d left his wife, Mary, and two children, Harry Jr. and Mary. His insurance business had gone sour. He was broke. Looking for a new source of cash, he turned to his lifelong hobby: fudge. A confectioner in the tony Wilshire neighborhood bought it from Baker for fifty cents a pound. It was enough to afford him a living.

    Harry also began to tinker with cake recipes, and he would have put Cook’s Illustrated’s Stephen Schmidt to shame. He devised more than four hundred different recipes in his quest to bake a sweeter, moister angel food cake. He varied ingredients, measurements, and the baking time and temperature. Nothing satisfied. In later years, he described the eureka moment that led him to salad oil in almost mystical terms: It was, he told a reporter at the Minneapolis Tribune, a “sixth sense—something cosmic” that revealed his secret ingredient. And it worked.

    During the time that Harry Baker was handing out experimental cakes to his neighbors, a handful of entrepreneurs pooled resources to launch a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard. The Brown Derby opened for business in 1926, in a building shaped to match its name. Two years later—call it another cosmic twist—Harry Baker walked in with a sample of his unbelievable cake. It became one of the Derby’s signature dishes.