A staple at weddings, tea parties, funerals, church socials and birthdays, cake is more than just dessert to Southerners — it’s the last word in Southern food.
It’s also something of an ever-evolving cultural history on a plate.
For a young woman in the postwar South — and it doesn’t really matter which war we’re speaking of — baking a successful coconut or red velvet cake was often less a mere domestic task and more of a stylized rite of passage. In those days, a reputation as a champion baker elevated a woman to a position that approached celebrity status in her church or neighborhood. No dessert made a star quicker than a cake.
As far back as the mid-1800s, cakes have enjoyed totemic status in the southern United States. The word “cakewalk” came about when Southern slaves got together on weekends to mock the high-stepping, “high-society” ways of plantation owners with a dance. Once slave owners became aware of the activity, many of them allowed it (by way of retaining their dominion) and would occasionally even offer a cake or other delicacy to the winner. This, incidentally, is said to have given yet another phrase still in use today: “taking the cake.”
As with much Southern cuisine and culture, Southern cakes often have African American origins. Impoverished home cooks forced to work with a limited inventory of ingredients managed to fashion tasty desserts with whatever happened to be on hand. It was this spirit of experimentation that gave us Coca-Cola cake, tomato soup cake, and mayonnaise cake. (Yes, I said tomato soup cake.)
However, when it comes to the true staples of Southern sweets, there are three cake varieties that folks in the Bible Belt readily raise their right hands and swear by: caramel cake, a deceptively simple concoction whose proof is not in the pudding, but in its sublime, caramelized icing; red velvet cake, a luxurious holiday favorite; and coconut cake, which late New York Times food writer and avowed Southern boy Craig Claiborne never lost his taste for (the recipe for his family’s coconut cream cake in Craig Claiborne’s Southern Cooking is to die for).
The first of these, caramel cake, derives its simple goodness from a thick, creamy, carefully blended icing of brown sugar, milk, butter, and vanilla extract, which is spread over white-cake layers. According to food writer and historian John Egerton’s Southern Food, the secret to a successful caramel cake lies in ever so slightly burning the caramelized sugar in a heavy iron skillet. A special-event dessert, the cake’s standard height of three layers often climbs with the status of the event it accompanies — a seven-layer caramel wedding cake isn’t out of the question at certain nuptial celebrations.
Anyone who has watched the movie Steel Magnolias will remember the scene that revolves around the carving of an armadillo-shaped red velvet cake. While the armadillo’s icing had a greenish cast, the cake’s crimson layers — which carry a hint of cocoa flavor — are traditionally set off with white icing, usually made with either a sugar/butter base or with cream cheese. Although most folks agree the Technicolor tempter got its start in the South, red velvet cake is also known for the apocryphal tale of its origins. The story — which began circulating sometime in the 1940s — claimed that Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria hotel granted a diner’s request for the recipe, then billed her in the amount of $100. As it turns out, the story is simply an early version of an oft-circulated urban legend that has surfaced under various guises, including the more recent — and equally untrue — Neiman Marcus/wildly expensive chocolate chip cookie recipe tale.
While the real origin of red velvet cake remains a mystery, some Southerners swear it began as an Easter cake, with the white icing representing the purity of Jesus and the deep red body of the cake his blood. Whatever the reason, the cake’s color has landed it on dessert plates at innumerable Valentine’s Day, birthday, and Christmas celebrations. The deep red hue? No mystery there — just a couple of bottles of red food coloring mixed into the batter (skimping on the food coloring will yield a pink velvet cake).
Our third classic, coconut cake, has been a fixture in Southern baking repertoires for so long that hard facts about its origins are elusive. Rumor has it that the cake first hit tables in Jamaica and Cuba before entering the South through port cities such as New Orleans. Indeed, coconut cake is a tradition in Nola, where the renowned K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen requires that patrons request the dessert at least a week in advance. The bakers need enough notice to order fresh coconuts, which they must crack, peel and grate (even then, the restaurant can’t guarantee that it will be available when you arrive). Like red velvet cake, the classic Southern-style coconut cake is a holiday favorite that ranks only behind ambrosia and fruitcake on the well-stocked Southern table.
Not that we need a seasonal reason to sate our sweet tooth. After all, every time a Southerner pulls out the mixing bowl and fires up the oven in preparation for baking a cake, there’s a liberal sprinkling of history in the batter.
Timothy C. Davis is a correspondent for Gravy, the official newsletter of the Southern Foodways Alliance. His food writing has appeared in Gastronomica, Saveur, The Christian Science Monitor, and the food website egullet.com, among other publications.
This article appears in Dec 28, 2005 – Jan 3, 2006.
