Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (55 page)

A few days after my conversations with Johns, I received a second sample of
dirt in the mail, this time from the Down Home Georgia White Dirt Company in Griffin, Georgia. A company spokesman assured me that this dirt,
kaoline from a private mine, is sold strictly as a novelty item (The label says,
"Not Suggested for Human Consumption"). But the person who first told me
about it, the owner of Mrs. Bea's Kitchen in Atlanta, said that all her customers for the dirt were women looking for edible clays. She stocks it behind
the cash register, along with the candy and cigarettes, and charges $1.29 for a
one-pound bag.

I broke open the bag that was sent to me and bit off a small piece of one of
the white chunks. It was fine, not gritty at all, but very gummy and chalk-like.
I can't imagine craving this stuff, and craving it more than food, a feeling that
many dirt-eaters have reported. But, hey, I'm an omnivore (and a woman
too), and so I will keep my dietary options open.

In Lady Baltimore, Owen Wister's ornate 19o6 novel of American manners set
in the post-Civil War South, the protagonist, John Mayrant, is engaged to a
"steel wasp" of dubious background. (She is from either Natchez or Mobile;
her father, a Confederate general, is said to have fled the Battle of Chattanooga.) She smokes, drinks highballs, and consorts with other men, including
a New York banker she uses to investigate the magnitude of her future husband's fortune. However, in the eyes of the narrator, the gravest of her sins is
that she pretends to be so financially strapped that the prospective groom
must arrange the details of the wedding himself. This includes ordering a
cake-a Lady Baltimore-from the Woman's Exchange tea room.

Though the cake business takes place as the novel opens, John has already
realized he may have made a mistake. But he is a man of honor, and this is
turn-of-the-century Charleston (Wister changed the city's name to King's
Port on the advice of his friend Henry James), where honor is pretty much all
there is left. Finally, after a lot of tortured goings-on and some not-very-welldisguised lectures from the author on North-South relations and the wisdom
of the Fifteenth Amendment, our hero finds a way to release himself from his
previous engagement and marries the girl he really loves. It was the Lady Baltimore cake that did it-the bride turns out to be the sweet plantation girl he
ordered it from.

It is no wonder that this cake plays such a key role in the novel. It is really,
really good, a fact that the narrator, a Yankee who eats a piece for lunch almost
every day, comments on with frequency. ("Oh, my goodness! Did you ever
taste it? It's all soft, and it's in layers, and it has nuts-but I can't write any
more about it; my mouth waters too much.") It turns out that there really was
a Woman's Exchange in Charleston, and legend has it that Owen Wister was
served a piece of the cake there by its creator, Alicia Rhett Mayberry. But in the
years since, its popularity has grown far beyond that city. A light, three-layer
"silver" cake (meaning it is made with egg whites instead of yolks), it has a fill ing containing dried figs, pecans, raisins, and a bit of brandy or sherry. It is indeed grand enough for a wedding, and its fame spawned a Lord Baltimore
cake (made with yolks instead of whites, and whose filling contains macaroon
crumbs, toasted almonds, and candied cherries).

No one can tell me why Mrs. Mayberry, a native of Charleston, named the
cake Lady Baltimore, but there was such a woman. Her name was Joan
Calvert, second wife of George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore, who founded
the first religiously tolerant colony in North America (Avalon, a refuge for
Catholics fleeing English penal laws, on the southern coat of Newfoundland)
and whose heirs founded St. Mary's City, the first settlement in what is now
Maryland. Mrs. Calvert, a rather homely woman with jet black ringlets, seems
unlikely to have inspired such a rapturous cake. It's more likely there was a fad
for using her title, which has been given to everything from a silver pattern to
a species of African violet. And while her cake is probably the most famous
one named after someone, there are plenty more.

Usually cakes are named for famous people who like them. There's a Robert E. Lee cake, a popular (during his lifetime) sponge cake with a citrusy
filling the general is said to have loved, and a Robert Redford cake that the legendary baker Maida Heatter read about in Chocolate News magazine. (Redford was reported to have been wild about a chocolate cake sweetened with
honey he ate in a Manhattan restaurant, so Heatter procured the recipe and
gave it his name.) There's a flourless chocolate cake named after the late queen
mother. (It was served to her once at tea in a private house, and, the story goes,
she began featuring it at royal parties.) There is even a cake, a genoise layered
with kirsch-flavored creme mousseline and strawberries, named after a bandleader, Ray Ventura, who was popular in France just after World War II.

A carrot cake is often called a Queen Anne's cake in England, but it is
named after Queen Anne's lace, the flower, which is in fact a wild carrot. In
France, there are Proust's famous madeleines and the cupcakes called marguerites. In this country, cakes are mass-produced and have the decidedly
more down-market names of Little Debbie and Suzy Q. A whole company
named after Dolley Madison makes a dreadful chocolate cream-filled version.
Dolley was far more famous for introducing ice cream to the White House
(introduced to her by Thomas Jefferson, who had enjoyed it in Paris) at her
raucous Wednesday-night receptions. I'm sure there were plenty of cakes offered on those occasions, but they wouldn't have been anything like the toosweet chocolate sponge cake that bears her name. In those pre-baking powder
days, cakes were dense affairs, loaded with alcohol, dried fruits, and nuts.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, baking powder finally became reli able, so cooks deconstructed those Old English-style cakes, incorporating
their booze and fruits and nuts into fillings that they then put between layers
of the newly possible light and airy cakes. The Lady Baltimore and Robert E.
Lee cakes are typical of Southern cakes invented in that period, as is Mrs.
Emma Ryulander Lane's Prize Cake. Originally published in 1898 in Some
Good Things to Eat, the recipe for Lane Cake, as it is now known, called for a
rich white cake filled with an even richer custard containing "one wineglass
full of good whiskey or brandy" and raisins. It is still popular in the South, but
I've seen the recipes for it everywhere, including James Beard's Menus for Entertaining. He adds coconut, pecans, and cherries to the filling and inexplicably refers to poor departed Mrs. Lane as Glenna McGinnis Lane.

The Mrs. Lane of my day is almost certainly Mrs. Margaret Harling, the
mother of my friend screenwriter Robert Harling and the maker of a coconut
cake that is one of the best things I have ever eaten. Owen Wister would surely
move to her hometown of Natchitoches, Louisiana, and come up with a novel
to set there were he alive to taste it. I long to be the first person to publish its
recipe, named, of course, Mrs. Margaret Harling's Prize Cake. Alas, though
she makes it almost weekly for church bazaars and birthdays, the recipe is
locked in her head and fails to work as soon as she puts it on paper. There is a
long history of this problem among instinctive cooks, but I intend to persevere. Until then, I'll make do with generous gifts from Mrs. Harling and, of
course, the luscious Lady Baltimore. Or perhaps, in honor of the patriotic
spirit currently pervading our land, I'll switch to the Betsy Ross, a white sheet
cake iced with white butter cream and decorated with strawberries and blueberries to form the Stars and Stripes.

In 1962, I was playing the first baseball game of the season with Beaufort High
School. Our best pitcher was the boy who sat next to me in Gene Norris's English class, Randy Randle, son of the school superintendent. Randy was a superb athlete and a delight for us other boys in the classroom -mouthy, irreverent, and extroverted.

Mr. Norris would get exasperated with Randy and say, "Sit down in your
seat, Randy, you fool. And hush your mouth, boy."

"Norris," Randy would say sadly, "don't forget who my father is. Your job's
hanging by a thread, Gene. One word from me, and you're in the unemployment line."

"Don't you dare call me Gene, you little scalawag," Mr. Norris would rage.
"How dare you threaten me with my job!"

"No threat, Gene," Randy would say, grinning at the class. "I'm talking fact
here, son."

Randy had asked me to go golfing with him on Easter weekend, when he
and his parents were returning to his grandmother's house in Newberry,
South Carolina. Because I was a military brat, I had never gone to anyone's
house for a whole weekend in my life. Up until then my high school years had
been excruciatingly lonely ones. My mother was thrilled that Randy had extended this invitation and gave me permission to go immediately.

At fifteen, Randy was six feet four inches tall and a true baseball talent. Already there was talk about his pitching in the major leagues one day. But that
first game our coach started Jimmy Melvin, a lanky junior who was hit hard
by the visiting Wade Hampton team in the first inning. Jimmy Melvin's name
is now enshrined on the wall of black marble honoring those killed in action
in Vietnam during that long, dispiriting war. The coach replaced Jimmy with
Bruce Harper, who had a fastball I was afraid of, but Bruce was throwing wild
that afternoon. Soon the coach had Randy warming up in what passed for a
bull pen at Beaufort High. Bruce Harper would walk out of the history of that game and into the history of his time: He would serve with distinction as one
of John Ehrlichman's lawyers during the Watergate trials.

Then it was Randy Randle's time, and he was called on to shut down the
Wade Hampton Generals. Randy was going to prove that there was substance
to all the talk about his chances in the majors. He struck out five of the first
seven batters he faced, and the other two batters did not even get the ball out
of the infield.