Aging turkey cake
I don't have anything against getting old(er). Mostly because I discovered that since my eyesight has been happily declining along with the rest of me, I never see my wrinkles with the same clarity that other people do. Life doles out to each of us that amount we can safely handle, hence my own welcome shift to soft-focus. Stir a preternaturally active 6-year-old into this batter and you get a mom who not only can't see what her aging face really looks like, but is too tired to care anyway.
This past Christmas however, I made the bitterest of all aging-related discoveries: I can no longer eat what I used to. Or, more precisely, I can't indulge in my favorite of all year-end passions, black cake, with the orgiastic abandon of Christmases past. Sadly, it's now all been carefully wrapped and stored in the freezer, and I don't even know if it freezes well (I've never had to find out!). Who knows what we'll find in a few months, or whenever my stomach settles down, whichever is sooner.
So, what is black cake?
Basically, it's an ungodly amount of rum/port-marinated, ground dried fruit married to a spiced cake batter, laced with with burnt sugar, then baked for about 3-4 hours (leading Tom to christen it turkey cake). Upon its extraction from the oven, the turkey cake is dribbled with port or rum or whatever's handy, and again each week for about a month, longer if possible. It's only made at Christmas time, so this all needs to come together in November.
But there's so much, much more to turkey cake, well beyond the sensory trifecta of bouquet, rum-soaked texture and ineffable taste. It has to do with dislocation and thinning memories of a West Indian childhood, and a fundamental need to honor old traditions. The black cake I carry in my head comes from the banks of the Pomeroon river in Guyana, and an old wooden house now fast becoming a ruin. Slow-baked in a wood-fired oven with no temperature controls other than a practised eye, in old floured cookie tins crusted from years of sooty use, and liberally doused with Guyanese rum and cheap, syrupy port.
And after a long fallow period of not wanting to attempt my own version of the cake, my recipe started with one I found somewhere on the internet, since (of course) no-one seems to have this written down. It gets augmented every year through my own clumsy trials, and each year I think I get a little closer to what I remember, but not by much.
Perhaps this is the stuff out of which family lore is constructed, and years from now everyone will fall out laughing to think of Grandma making all that black cake at Christmas time, and getting so pissed off because she couldn't eat as much of it as she wanted.
January 2, 2008
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Bob Watts: In memory of my friend who died yesterday morning at 5am.
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You have to admire her nerve: Tom brought these back from Milwaukee and Hannah stuck them all to the fridge. Later, I realised she'd quietly added her own name, and it just broke us up.
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