I appreciate your reading Between the Layers! For the entire post and recipe, won’t you consider becoming a paid subscriber? Dreaming about Mashula’s Coconut Cake - No. 204Bake Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding-inspired cake for Easter or just because
EUDORA WELTY’S DELTA WEDDING, SET DEEP in the Mississippi Delta in 1923, makes me hungry for coconut cake. Or any tall, grand layer cake for that matter. Mashula’s Coconut Cake is an almond, lemon, and coconut character woven into the novel, and I yearn to be in that kitchen where the eggs are cracked, the coconut grated, and the frosting, as Eudora Welty once said all great recipes should be, ‘’thunderously rich.’’ Mashula was an old great-aunt of Ellen Fairchild, and now Ellen prepares this family cake with her nine-year-old niece Laura McRaven, the book’s protagonist, who has just lost her mother and has traveled alone on the Yazoo-Delta (nicknamed Yellow Dog) train from Jackson to Shellmound plantation for her cousin Dabney’s—Ellen’s daughter’s—wedding. Ellen instructs Laura on the intricacies of this cake such as how to spread the frosting “thick on the top” and decorate it with almond halves “close enough to touch.” And she shares other wisdom:
From the ingredients used—imported lemons, almonds, and coconut—you sense the Fairchild family’s affluence and influence, and Welty knew as only someone who was raised in Mississippi would know that baking a layer cake is a diversion as well as a statement. “Cakes have been traditional proof of a cook’s skill, particularly in the South,” according to Ann Romines, a Eudora Welty scholar who transformed the cake description in Delta Wedding into the real recipe I adapt for you today. Romines noted it was natural for a writer such as Welty to embed a recipe in her book as she had spent the 1930s recording the recipes of Mississippi for the Federal Writers’ Project.
I just returned from the Mississippi Delta recreating a family’s beloved chocolate meringue pie recipe for my book on Southern baking.If you drive through the Delta in October, the vast fields will be white with cotton. They were brown last week because planting cotton and soybeans hadn’t yet begun. And they were wet with mud from the rain and storms that have thrashed the region. But you still get the feeling the fields go on forever. Just to the south is Rolling Fork, a town pummeled by the recent tornado that lasted nearly an hour and took the lives of two dozen people. There is a vulnerability here in this stark Delta landscape conducive to farming. It is without shelter, trees, and safe harbors. Mississippi is our poorest state, and rural, like much of the South, where people in small towns depend on each other and belong to big families. It is both welcoming and exclusive at the same time. Here, tiered cakes of caramel or coconut are trouble to assemble, sold out of filling stations and home kitchens, and either impress your guests or pay your rent, and I wonder as I read the details of Mashula’s cake if Welty didn’t know all of that when she let the mother of the bride fuss over this cake in the sanctuary of every Mississippi home—the kitchen. We are in control of what we bake and the recipes we choose to hang onto and repeat for the next generation even when we can’t be in control of what’s happening in the world around us. War is a central theme in this book as well—the South picking back up after the Civil War, finding an enemy greater than the North during World War I and the author herself missing her brother and close friend serving during World War II. In the book, Ellen could do nothing about her 17-year-old daughter marrying a man twice her age and socially beneath her, but she could bake this beautiful cake.
You have to love the Delta.In 1946, when this book was published, Eudora Welty knew her readers would be hungry for layer cake after years of war rationing, giving up, and doing without. If the book had been set in Charleston, South Carolina, the cake might have been a grand Lady Baltimore, dressy white layers filled with sherry-soaked figs, raisins, and walnuts, and scented with just a suggestion of lemon. But Welty’s cake was all about Mississippi, where author W. Ralph Eubanks says ordinariness is paired with beauty, ‘’magic with madness, and mystery with magnificence.’’ It is in close proximity to Gulf ports and New Orleans where lemons, coconuts, and almonds came off ships regularly and where sugar has always been at hand. Those ingredients made their way into cherished Delta recipes and fueled a love of cake baking, whether coconut or caramel... Subscribe to Anne Byrn: Between the Layers to read the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Anne Byrn: Between the Layers to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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