Welcome to the free issue of Between the Layers: A conversation about life through the lens of cooking and baking. For more great content and recipes, consider becoming a paid subscriber! Make Cake, Not WarVisiting the past to make sense of the present & an eerily delicious chocolate cake served to the creators of the atom bomb
I’ve devoted my writing this month to topics related to the war in Ukraine, but no worries, in April I’ll be back to my usual content. I started writing on Substack nearly a year ago as a way to share my authentic self, what’s on my mind, what’s not in my cookbooks. This war is on my mind, and I welcome your feedback with open arms.
As the war in Ukraine wages, I stay fixated via TV while washing dishes in a warm house while a pot of soup simmers on my stove. Then comes the guilt. The war of good vs evil is a world away but that cannot erase the images I’ve seen—you’ve seen—of maternity hospitals blown up, lives destroyed, people willing to die to save their country, and of Europeans taking strangers into their homes to give them shelter. And then the talk of nuclear arsenals, which brings to mind other wars, other times… Edith Warner was a 30-year-old Philadelphia school teacher who moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, in 1922, and fell in love with the natural beauty of the Southwest. She befriended the nearby Pueblo people, and she became caretaker of a train depot along the Rio Grade called Otowi Bridge. Her adobe tearoom was a refuge for friends and visitors, and here Edith shared tea and slices of her favorite chocolate cake. When the United States entered World War II and the Manhattan Project came to Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Niels Bohr, fathers of the atom bomb, frequented her tearoom for cake and conversation.
A chocolate cake with a satiny chocolate-coffee icing like your mother might have baked fed the souls of the men who built the first atom bomb, which abruptly ended the war once dropped over Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, Japan, in August, 1945. This is something I find both frightening and fascinating. Thankfully I have this newsletter and now will try to write about war and food and joy, all in the same conversation. I think back to the tearoom chocolate cake Edith Warner baked for the nuclear scientists. Did she know what they were plotting? How can something so utterly delicious like chocolate cake feed devastation? Or, to look at it another way, how can deprivation and wartime recipes stay with us and become a part of our story in peaceful times many decades later? Waste not, want not. Make margarine, bake beans. Kitchen duty in wartime.Take oatmeal cookies—“save the wheat for the troops and bake with oats”—and applesauce cake—made with your own apples and “shy on sugar”— these recipes sprang out of World War I, and I can’t imagine an American cookbook without them. To make some sense of it, I reached out to my friend Constance (Connie) Carter, career librarian at the Library of Congress (LOC), whom I met seven years ago in the D.C. airport. I sat down next to Connie at the gate, and she was reading a book on Julia Child, and so conversation started. Connie is a walking card catalog and knows every book that’s ever been published and if not, how to find it thanks to her more than 50-year tenure at the LOC. And besides, she was born in New Hampshire after one world war and before another had begun.
Connie’s job in World War II was “to go out on the roadside and pluck milkweed,” she said. “They used milkweed inside the feather linings in airmen’s jackets to keep people afloat. And my job at home was to put food coloring in the margarine…it came with a little dot and you broke open the dot and had to whip it in so it would look more like butter. “We kept a big crock in the basement with eggs used for cooking and they were in silica gel, so it was like putting your hands in slime to pull one out. We sold war bonds and took all the paper off Wrigleys spearmint gum and made tinfoil balls that we took to a big outpost where they gathered all the foil for I’m not sure what.” And for entertainment, Connie and her family walked into the towns of Nashua or Keene on Sundays and window shopped. They blacked out their windows, used their car sparingly, and her father was an air raid warden. “Our back porch was filled with army blankets and helmets.” And the family ate simply. Connie’s mother didn’t make meatloaf out of beans, which was vogue in war years, but it was very much “waste not want not.” “We got shoes only when our toes were pinched and we were walking funnily. You wore things out, and you wore hand-me-downs. I wore my brother’s underwear! I was mortified,” she said, with a laugh.
Wars brought new ingredients and reasons for cooking and bakingJust as gingerbread evolved into the first American cake in the Revolutionary War years, so a “war cake” without eggs or butter or sugar was the poster cake of the Civil War. And the Civil War brought community cookbooks. They were fundraising tools to clean up cities and help fund efforts for milk that was fit to drink and later, the women’s right to vote. In WW1 Americans were asked to give up wheat to feed troops and bake with oats and rye instead. My father never outgrew the wartime and Depression habit of thrift instilled in him by his older parents. And Connie remembers her mother wouldn’t make brownies until she had enough chicken fat to use instead of butter. Smaller portions, wheatless biscuits and muffins, meat extenders and substitutes, sugar-saving desserts, and patriotic cakes and cookies—these were the bill of fare. Interestingly, Amelia Doddridge, a Delaware home demonstration agent who wrote the 1918 book, Liberty Recipes, advised the WW1 ladies who came to her talks to “husband your stuff, don’t stuff your husband.”
Cookbooks published after World War II revealed more international flavors than before the war. GIs stationed in Italy brought back a love of pizza, which wound up in restaurants and on home dinner tables. M&M’s candy was inspired by the chocolate rations given to soldiers, compact ways to feed the troops. And the technology for freeze-drying blood plasma to treat soldiers in the field would find its way into our kitchen with the invention of freeze-drying coffee to improve the flavor of instant coffee in the 1960s. Connie said habits that people got into during the war like baking patriotic blackout cakes or planting victory gardens, even women working outside the home, continued long after the war was over. Today, as I research a book on Southern baking, I learn Jewish recipes such as rugelach are very much a part of our baking heritage because survivors of the Holocaust baked them and they’ve been repeated each year to remember. Vietnam and baking for hope today
There’s not a lot written about how the Vietnam War might have affected what we eat at this moment. Vietnamese refugees resettling in America brought their cuisine and love of lemongrass and fish sauce with them, and we are all the better for it. Yum… And in New Orleans today, a city founded by the French, did you know the Vietnamese bakers are baking the real French bread? And no doubt, Connie said, the U.S. military shaped the way we eat post-Vietnam with the creation of energy bars. “Everyone was against the war—there was violence on campuses, there were constant throngs protesting in front of the White House—everyone was angry. I do remember care packages and letters sent to soldiers—suggestions of how to pack brownies and what kinds of cookies traveled well—I think of people supporting the soldiers from their home town—but I do not remember rationing, being asked to do without.” I think back to the pandemic’s supply chain issues. Could Americans bake a cake with a rationing book today? In World War II, food was in short supply for multiple reasons, including it being reserved for the military and our Allies, and shipping issues because gasoline and tires were rationed. Soldiers and war supplies were more important things to ship. Plus, imports on some foods like coffee and sugar were restricted. So you received a ration book with removable stamps to redeem for certain items, and once those were used up for the month, you had to get creative. In England, rationing in war years was a way of life.
I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but I think Americans have become more prone to hoarding yeast and flour than baking without them. These rising gas prices may force us to shop less and rely even more on our pantries. What if the war in Ukraine made us less recipe dependent and more confident in our own abilities to throw together a meal from what we’ve got? Make do? Or maybe bake sales could wage a comeback? I’m all for good old-fashioned fundraising to help resettle refugees from Ukraine (#BakeForUkraine), Afghanistan, or other war-torn countries. Or we could bake Mollie Katzen’s Ukrainian poppy seed cake to pay respect. That’s what Marcie Cohen Ferris did last week to honor her Ukrainian grandmother, Luba Tooter Cohen, born in Odessa in 1897. I’ve just ordered Mamushka: Recipes from Ukraine & Eastern Europe, by Olia Hercules, and I can’t take my eyes off her Easter bread, dripping in icing and sprinkles. It looks like hope to me.
Edith Warner’s Chocolate Loaf CakeThis is a versatile chocolate cake that can be baked in a loaf or square pan. It is light and moist and really needs no icing, but the icing is so delicious you will want to make it. If you have my book American Cake, you will see I’ve reduced the baking powder to 1 teaspoon and incorporated the eggs after creaming the sugar with the butter and chocolate. It’s a more logical way to make a cake, I think. And I’ve increased the chocolate slightly, so my apologies to Edith Warner for amending her recipe, but I believe, it’s better! Makes: 10 to 12 servings Prep: 30 minutes Bake: About 75 minutes Cake: Butter and flour to prep the pan 1 cup all-purpose (plain) flour 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped 3 tablespoons unsalted butter 1 cup granulated sugar 3 large eggs ½ cup whole milk Icing: 1 cup plus 1 tablespoon sifted confectioners’ sugar 2 heaping tablespoons unsweetened cocoa Pinch of salt 2 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted 2 tablespoons brewed coffee 1. Place a rack in the center of the oven, and preheat the oven to 250 degrees F. Lightly grease and flour a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan, and shake out the excess flour. Set the pan aside. 2. For the cake, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt and set aside. Place the chocolate and butter in a small saucepan and melt, stirring constantly, over low heat. Pour the sugar into a mixing bowl and pour the melted chocolate and butter over it. Blend with an electric mixer on low speed until the mixture is combined but still grainy, 30 to 45 seconds, or by hand – 1 to 2 minutes. Beat in eggs, one at a time, until blended. 3. Turn off the mixer, and add a third of the flour mixture and half of the milk, blend on low speed to combine, then add another third flour, then remaining milk, and end with the rest of the flour mixture, blending or stirring by hand until just combined. Stop the mixer and scrape the sides of the bowl. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan and place the pan in the oven. 3. Bake 15 minutes. Then without removing the pan from the oven, increase the temperature to 275 degrees. Bake 15 minutes. Increase the oven to 300 degrees, and bake 45 minutes more, or until the top is firm when lightly pressed with your finger. Remove the pan from the oven to a wire rack to cool 20 minutes. Run a knife around the edges of the pan to loosen the cake. Turn it out to cool completely, right-side up, 40 to 45 minutes. 4. For the icing, place the sugar, cocoa, and salt in a medium-size mixing bowl and whisk to combine. Whisk in the melted butter and coffee until the icing is spreadable. Spread the icing over the top of the cake. Slice and serve. Other resources/things to read/how to support UkraineMany thanks to Between the Layers subscriber, Connie Carter! She “officially” retires from the Library of Congress in June but will continue to work with special collections. Read Everyday Foods in Wartime by Mary Swartz Rose. Read The House at Otowi Bridge: The Story of Edith Warner and Los Alamos. Read Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat, by Anastacia Marx de Salcedo. Read Luisa Weiss and her Substack newsletter, Letter from Berlin, where she shares how German life is being affected by the war in Ukraine. Have you tried out the Substack App? To help Ukraine: I am supporting the efforts of the World Central Kitchen, and all March subscriptions for this newsletter go to World Central Kitchen to feed the Ukrainian refugees. Or, here is how to donate directly to World Central Kitchen. Or UNICEF. More than one million children have left Ukraine because of this war. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
This Thursday I’ll be sharing my Three Favorite Things about St. Patrick’s Day with paid subscribers, which does not include how I dance this Irish jig but does include a very fabulous and family-tested recipe for soda bread. May the luck of the Irish be with you all week! Anne
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