Tag: holiday cakes

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Queen Cakes

In cake aristocracy, we have the Lady Baltimore (His Lordship has one, too), the Regent, the Prince of Wales, and of course King Cakes. Then there are Queen Cakes, somewhat larger than cupcakes, which are traditionally baked in ribbed “patty-pans,” which modern-day paper cupcake liners faithfully replicate.

The recipe is like a pound cake’s, but an essential traditional ingredient is currents. Currants were popular in this country up until the early 20th century when their production and shipment were banned under federal law in 1911 because the plants were unjustly tagged as vectors for a timber blight. The ban was later relegated to local jurisdictions, but it’s unlikely you’ll find currants–fresh, frozen, or dried–in markets. You might find  Zante currants, which are actually dried seedless grapes, which on most days I call raisins. Me, I cut to the chase and use Sun-Maid.

Queen Cakes

Cream 2 cups softened butter with 2 cups sugar, then beat in 8 eggs one at a time. Mix the batter very well, then add a teaspoon vanilla; a half teaspoon mace, and 2 tablespoons brandy or rosewater are traditional, but optional. Sift a teaspoon baking powder with 4 cups cake flour. Mix very well until stiff, but not dry.  Add your “currants” liberally, but toss them with a bit of corn starch first, since they tend to clump. Use softened butter to grease your “patty-pans” (cupcake pans to us commoners) and paper liners. Fill cups a little over half-way with batter, and bake at 350 on the middle rack until golden and springy. Allow to cool completely before removing from pans. Feel free to top with royal icing.

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Note from a Culinary Gumshoe

Anyone who entrusts you with a family recipe loves you and will give you other instructions like, “Get a job.”

Such traditions bind us all, and heirloom recipes should be treasured as reflections of a people and their character. I’m always on the lookout for old recipes from family lines and any dish not mentioned in that harangue of books and magazines devoted to Southern cuisine. Community cookbooks are a fine source of these recipes, but you can bet your bottom dollar that more than a few contributors are simply not going to share essential details because the church secretary was caught sleeping with her brother-in-law.

Some years ago, I found a recipe that stands out: amalgamation cake. Yes, it’s a cake, but amalgamation is a word you usually stumble on in cookery works by dirt road academics purportedly “devoted to” and “enthralled with” Southern foodways. I first heard this cake mentioned by a friend from Tupelo; queries to others brought about a dozen responses, all of them indicating that the amalgamation cake originated from northeast Mississippi and adjacent Alabama.

I felt smug about isolating a true north Mississippi heirloom when someone popped up and pointed out that Ferrol Sams mentions amalgamation cake (“And he’s from Georgia!). Recipes also hail from northwest Tennessee, western South Carolina and a bundt from Florida that seems way off all maps, but I consider these exceptions mere anomalies. A bit of research uncovered no mention of amalgamation cake in Southern Living, nor in any of Quail Ridge Press’s “Best of the Best” series, nor in any of my Jackson cookbooks. It is in The Mississippi Cookbook, published by the Mississippi Cooperative Extension Service in 1972, confirming that amalgamation cake is a genuinely rural culinary tradition.

Discovering the origins of this recipe became a grail quest. The earliest recipe I’ve found is handwritten from Itawamba County in 1939, sent to me by Bob Franks in Fulton. Apparently recipes for amalgamation cake are jealously guarded in families, passed down and shared only with close friends and relatives. True to form, every recipe I received came with stringent instructions to follow; those who shared recipes with me said if I didn’t use fresh coconut that I would die and go to hell, presumably an even deeper level than hitherto assigned.

They also told me to get a job. Every damn one of them.

Amalgamation cake is always made for Christmas, and is similar to Alabama’s Lane cake, made famous by its mention in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The Lane cake was created by Emma Lane of Clayton, Alabama, who published her recipe in 1898. Most recipes for both cakes result in layers of white sponge cake with a filling of raisins, pecans, and coconut. The main difference between a Lane cake, which has it, and an amalgamation cake, which doesn’t, is liquor. The Lane cake, like its cousin the Lady Baltimore, is always infused with bourbon or some such, while the sober amalgamation abstains from spirits. The sole exception to this rule is an amalgamation recipe from my home county in Mississippi—Calhoun: “Vote dry and drink wet!”—which calls for a sweet wine wrap overnight.

The following recipe was published in The Tuscaloosa News in Nov. 2011. It comes from the hands of Billie Ruth Armstrong Moore, a student in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute’s “Preserving Your Family History” class. Asked to bring in a family recipe and write about it, she wrote:

“Granny’s Amalgamation Cake was a favorite dessert at Thanksgiving and Christmas which our extended Armstrong family always celebrated at the home of my grandmother, Georgia Elizabeth Shumpert Armstrong. Her home was located near the Evergreen Community which is in the southwest corner of Itawamba County, Mississippi, near about where Tammy Wynette came from.”

Billie Ruth includes scaly bark hickory nuts, a distinctively rural (and native) ingredient. White raisins were mentioned as a refinement. A “seven minute” frosting is a standard option.

BATTER

1 1⁄2 cups sugar
1⁄2 cup Crisco
3 eggs (or 9 egg whites)
1 cup milk
2 1⁄2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring

FILLING

9 egg yolks
2 cups sugar
1 3⁄4 cups milk
1⁄4 pound butter
1 15-ounce box raisins
1 1⁄2 cups mixed nuts (1 cup pecans and 1⁄2 cup scaly barks)
1 big coconut, grated

Bake batter in two or three layers. For filling, beat egg yolks well, and then add sugar, milk and butter. Mix well and cook on medium heat until thickened slightly. Add raisins and nuts, cook until thick, add coconut last. Beat well, cool, spread between layers, then assemble and frost cake. Let rest several hours—overnight if possible—before serving.

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Deconstructing White Fruitcake

Over the years, much has been made of Eudora Welty’s white fruitcake which she first mentions in her introduction to The Jackson Cookbook, published by the Jackson Symphony League in January 1971. Welty writes:

I daresay any fine recipe used in Jackson could be attributed to a local lady, or her mother—Mrs. Cabell’s Pecans, Mrs. Wright’s Cocoons, Mrs. Lyell’s Lemon Dessert. Recipes, in the first place, had to be imparted—there was something oracular in the transaction—and however often they were made after that by others, they kept their right names. I make Mrs. Mosal’s White  Fruitcake every Christmas, having got it from my mother, who got it from Mrs. Mosal.”

A predominant theme of Southern literature—indeed, of Southern life itself—is the past as a vital, influential narrative. Welty herself called memory “a living thing.” Our minds recapture memories to bring color, shape, and voice to our past; we are galleries of ghosts. Sometimes our past is hidden beyond the reach of reason in some object or sensation that will return to mind the faces and voices of former times. Welty affirms this process of evoking the past in saying, “I often think to make a friend’s fine recipe is to celebrate her once more.” Recipes such as those in The Jackson Cookbook, for Welty and her contemporaries, became keys to a still-vibrant communal past.

“Mrs. Mosal” was Marie Antoinette (her friends called her Toni . . .) Mosal (née Alexander). Born in Hill, Texas, attended Centenary College in Louisiana, where she might likely have met her husband, John Mosal, Sr. In time, John Mosal became president of the Jackson Foundry and Machine Company, whose iconic mill-type building still stands at 300 West South Street.

Oddly enough, The Jackson Cookbook itself does not contain Mrs. Mosal’s recipe, but rather one from “Mrs. D.I. Meredith,” whose daughter Shirley was Welty’s classmate at Central High, and whose husband was a manager at the original McRae’s Department Store cattycorner from the Governor’s Mansion on the corner of N. West and N. Congress Streets.

MRS. MOSAL’S WHITE FRUIT CAKE

Cream 3 sticks of softened butter with 2 cups of sugar. Gradually beat in 6 whole eggs, a half cup of whiskey and 2 tablespoons pure vanilla extract. In a separate bowl combine 3 cups flour sifted with 2 tablespoons baking powder. In another bowl, mix 1 pound chopped candied fruit (pineapple and cherries), 1 pound chopped nuts (pecans, walnuts, or a blend), and a cup of flour. Add dry ingredients to creamed butter, then fruit and nut blend. Mix very, very well. Pour batter into a lightly greased and floured tube pan or 2 loaf pans (my recommendation). Bake at 325 for 90 minutes; tent with foil for the last 30 minutes. Serves 16.