The Good Son
A festive Halloween blizzard. Citizens rush home to their households and hubbies, their wives, their straight husbands and straight wives, their babes and tots and teens, their pets and dead or living potted plants. The deep and damp furrow of shared human experiences makes the heart sing — not mine! I am on a train. I am too busy listening to Mastodon.
After I get home and after I turn off Mastodon, I take off my shoes, turn on the lights, pull down the blinds, switch on the plant light, make my bed, throw my dirty clothes into the closet and pop in a Sex and the City DVD. The routine varies. Sometimes its Gilmore Girls, or, if I’m feeling real crispy, one of the later seasons of Due South, where I can watch Callum Keith Rennie’s insipid, yet intriguing little body be emotionally, sexually, and physically humiliated by strange nineties women and Paul Gross.
But since September, the first thing I do on homecoming is run into my kitchen, throw open the cabinet above the refrigerator, the alleged cool, dry place, the only one in my apartment big and secret enough for the gallon jar from Marshall’s Home Goods. Inside this jar soaks five pounds of cherries, currants, raisins, prunes, and mixed peel, over which I once poured one and a half bottles of black Bacardi and a bottle of blackberry Manischewitz. And, regardless of all the little ones playing their parts within, I only call it Rum Jar.
Rum Jar, who I hold inside my heart in sleep and in waking, is part one of a three-part recipe for Black Cake I found in Laurie Colwin’s book Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen. Colwin received it from her daughter’s babysitter Betty Chambers, who got it from her own mother, who got it from her own mother, in that manner of passing. If I was truly serious, I should have had the fruit socked away since June. I spent most of the summer and a good portion of the fall in pursuit of Feats of Strength, requiring a sensible and reasonable food journey that made it painful to consider the holiday season baking, except through delirious 1 AM list-making. So, September it was, when I could stand it no longer.
Laurie Colwin molded my criteria for what it takes for me to enjoy a food writer/personality. A sense of humor; natural warmth; not a chef; willingness to interact, but innately understanding of the homebody; probably a mom; jazzy permanent; at some point in life consistently washed dishes in the bathtub; absolutely no logical relationship between her hardline rules and the many other areas she’ll cut corners. The pleasant stress that occurs when I think of her comes from not knowing if I want her or want to be her, much in the same way I don’t know if I want or want to be Cher in Moonstruck, or Nicholas Cage in Moonstruck, or Olympia Dukakis in Moonstruck, or Feodor Chaliapin in Moonstruck, or Feodor Chaliapin’s pet dogs in Moonstruck.
Right now, only Rum Jar exists. After six weeks, the four quart tank of uniform purple has separated into three distinct yet sloppy layers of varying purple gradations. The whole kit, if all goes well, will transform into two black nine-inch cakes I intend to pull off for my Christmas party, an event where I lock my friends in my studio apartment with a five-hour playlist of Sufjan Steven’s Christmas albums and Hallmark movies. This is called willingness to interact, and it’s what happens to me when I take on a festive goal like Black Cake, or the earlier mentioned Feats of Strength.
So far, my willingness to interact has only been tested as far as myself standing at the tiny kitchen counter, blasting batch after batch of dried fruit in my small immersion blender TURBO attachment and nobly accepting my fate if one of the neighbors broke down my kitchen door with a fish billy, killing me instantly.
I’ve also cornered at least two friends and told them at length about the 15-pound morlock in my upper refrigerator cabinet, and my nefarious party plans. One of these circumstances was at a sexy Eyes Wide Shut themed party after several people finished reciting sadomasochistic monologues, and I was mainly worried about my bare boob popping out of my blazer. “So, what Hallmark movies are you showing us this year?” This friend asked, accurately conveying that, if I’m an average baker, at least I am even worse at dealing with atmosphere.
Regarding the taste of Black Cake and if it lives up to what I’ve heard, I can go no further. Like Laurie Colwin in her own Black Cake article, I have not yet baked my own (did she ever bake hers? She passed away in 1992, four years after Home Cooking was published, when I was still a baby. I lie awake at night and wonder)
Here is what Laurie says:
“There is fruitcake, and there is Black Cake, which is to fruitcake what the Brahms piano quartets are to Muzak. Its closest relatives are plum pudding and black bun, but it leaves both in the dust. Black Cake, like truffles and vintage Burgundy, is deep, complicated and intense. It has taste and aftertaste. It demands to be eaten in a slow, meditative way. The texture is complicated too — dense and light at the same time.”
In a similar, if pump up the volume vein to a Sacher Torte, this cake holds a dozen eggs. In addition to a pound of butter, a pound of brown sugar, a pound of flour, and another pound of burnt sugar, if one can’t find burnt sugar essence. I found this under names like ‘sugar browning’, ‘burnt sugar (browning)’ or sometimes simply ‘browning’. You can find it, like Laurie says, at any West Indian grocery. In Chicago, I found mine at Old World Market on Broadway, and on second glance I found more at my neighborhood grocery Morse Fresh Market, where bottles of Grace Browning sit next to the molasses. I’d walked past the shelf dozens of times, mistaking the pictured bricks of cake on the label for sheaves of meatloaf.
My small stand mixer bowl isn’t adequate. I need a bigger bowl. I need a massive bowl. I need two springform pans, a device that makes me nervous (what if it unlatches in the oven?) Rum Jar ferments in its cabinet, and I obsess about its well-being and happiness and health within the cabinet, and fret about disasters occurring inside the cabinet, calamities I think every parent wants to prevent in the crannies of their human baby: fruit flies and botulism.
Several forum discussions are dedicated to discussing the Black Cake in Home Cooking. In comparison to their own family recipes, in contrast to other black cakes they have eaten and known, in debate of the colors the other cakes have sported between pitch black to light brown, the discrepancies in amounts of burnt sugar essence (ranges from two tablespoons to two cups!) and the differences between using that versus burnt sugar made via stove-top, or the incident of using jerk chicken browning instead of sugar browning. If you really want to screw things up, link to Nigella Lawson’s interpretation. Everybody seems less worried about a wild black cake disaster than they are having of having nothing to discuss at all.
Nobody wants a catastrophe, in the way nobody welcomes a blizzard on Halloween. But we tempt catastrophe a bit, because the body and the brain are stupid, and also horny. It uses blackberry kosher wine instead of the accepted grape (ich?) or flirts with the destruction of their beloved immersion blender (ich??) or the wrath of the neighbors by using the immersion blender instead of the harder-to-clean food processor that exists in the home (I C H ? ? ? schau mich nicht an!!) What humiliation in a recipe, if your fate is failure, that the weight of your misfortune won’t equal the breadth and time and patience of your efforts! I soaked all this fucking fruit and all I got was this fucking cake that is only slightly different and vaguely less good than the other cakes.
Regard then, in the near future, the pulverization and cannibalization of Rum Jar (my mother slew me; my father ate me) which in absence of crisis or mediocrity, will instead lead to what I need — slamming a Belgian beer on an empty stomach on Wednesday night, anticipating the self satisfaction of my ordeal, and using the result to put the whammy on my friends.
