Food, Photography and Bon Mots
A lot of people have had a lot to say about cake. There was, of course Marie “Let them eat cake” Antoinette. Julia Child famously quipped “A party without a cake is really just a meeting.” British PM Boris Johnson stated his position on cake:…
Happy birthday to one of the kindest people I know–my neighbor Gene. Gene, a retired high school science teacher, avid gardener and gourmand, is a loyal a supporter of this blog. He also is celebrating his 87th birthday this month. Way to go, Gene! Gene…
Nana was my grandmother.
When I was a little girl, I would spend long happy weekends at her house. She always had a stack of books for me to read–young reader mysteries, as I recall. Sometimes she would take me to the tiny beauty shop improbably located in the back room of her local market where her beautician would fuss with my impossibly-fine hair and my sagging self-image. Other times, we would go dress shopping on Long Beach’s then-fashionable Pine Avenue at Zukor’s, her favorite shop, after which we always “lunched” at the lunch counter in the Woolworth’s where we always ordered hot turkey sandwiches covered in gravy and served with mashed potatoes. Life was good.
I like to believe that I got some of my interest in food and cooking from her. During those long-ago visits, she and I often would spend afternoons in her kitchen baking her signature cake–a gooey chocolate-frosted chocolate, vinegar, and potato cake.
The cake was always a curiosity for me. Why in the world would she stir mashed potatoes and vinegar into a sweet cake batter?
Curiosity aside, the cake was a celebration of my visiting her home — a cake made just for me–and I remember how special it made me feel and how loved. It tasted good, too.
Recently, I came across a recipe for a chocolate cake that incorporated vinegar into the batter.
So, I got to thinking. Why did Nana put vinegar in her cake and how did the vinegar affect the baking process?
Nana was born around the turn of the century (the 20th Century!). She saw two world wars and survived the Great Depression. Her husband fought in the first war and her son, my father, fought in the second. Both survived. If you think about it, in the period from 1900 (when Nana was born) until 1945, there were very few good years. Couple that with what was a decidedly rocky post-WWII period for my family and you have a lot of years of struggle.
Nana, like so many other grandmas during those lean times, learned to cope with scarcity. If you didn’t have eggs, you substituted vinegar. You made it work. Hers was a kind of “If life gives you lemons, make lemonade” ethos.
A true-believer in the power of food to nourish the soul, I can’t help but think that Nana personified the spunky survivor ethic that MFK Fisher wrote about in her WWII-era cookbook masterpiece How To Cook a Wolf: “I believe that one of the most dignified ways we are capable of, to assert and then reassert our dignity in the face of poverty and war’s fears and pains, is to nourish ourselves with all possible skill, delicacy, and ever increasing enjoyment. And with our gastronomical growth will come, inevitably, knowledge and perception of a hundred other things, but mainly of ourselves. Then Fate, even tangled as it is with cold wars as well as hot, cannot harm us.”
Now, the science…
Adding a little vinegar to a cake makes it fluffier. According to Bakingbites.com, the addition of a small amount of vinegar into baked goods causes a chemical reaction with another ingredient, baking soda. That chemical reaction creates carbon dioxide and the carbon dioxide gives the batter a little lift during baking. Also, the chemical reaction overcomes the fact that cocoa powder in the recipe makes the batter resist rising.
It turns out that Nana wasn’t just the best grandmother in my universe; she was also a kitchen chemist!
Here is my adaptation of a chocolate vinegar cake recipe. The cake is moist and over-the-top chocolaty. I know that Nana would approve. I think you will, too.
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Instructions
This recipe is adapted from one that appears on the King Arthur Flour site. Here is the link:King Arthur Flour’s Original Cake Pan Cake.
