Volume 7
An Online Literary Magazine
November 30, 2012

 

Correct Cakes

Nonfiction

Rick Bailey

 


The Secret Ingredient with a big fat, carbon footrpint: Nutella

 

M
y daughter has come home to put the finishing touches on wedding plans. This means periods of frenzy, elation, and angst. Lists, invitations, dresses, music, food, flowers. Suddenly the time to decide is now, or yesterday. But today she is calm, which means I am calm. She's been tasting cakes and has found one she likes made with corn.

 

"It was delicious," she says. "And so unusual."

 

I'm standing at the kitchen sink peeling a carrot. A few weeks ago I let a TV foodist lecture me about carrots. I’m peeling a virtuous carrot.

 

"No one eats wedding cake," I say.

 

"Because it's always so bad," she says. "I want mine to be good."

 

She's just finished culinary school. To watch her prepare a meal, even in our kitchen, is a little like going to the ballet. All that art. Her grub is so good, I want to stuff my bouche.

 

What she's thinking, what I'm thinking, is that corn cake for a wedding is edgy. But neither of us will say it. Some words, when they've been repeated a few billion times, in speech and in print, and repeated with that knowing wink (it's edgy to say edgy) totally lose their little jolt of electricity. At the end of the day, even if we're both on the same page, neither of us will ever say edgy. We’ll just put it out there. Corn cake. It will speak for itself.

 

This baker from Ann Arbor makes cakes that will please the locovore. All natural ingredients, preferably local. These are correct cakes.

 

"What was your cake?" she asks.

 

Rum torte. I would have been happy with one those white monstrosities that look like a drum set, preferably with an edible bride and groom on top. My wife worked with the baker, an amiable German immigrant named Peter, telling him exactly what she wanted, something simple, none of that sugary frosting, a cake people would want to eat. So we ended up with these little brown rounds of cake, all arranged in a circle, like a diorama of huts in a sustainable village. At some point in the evening, we posed and nudged slices of it into each other's mouths. It was good. I don't know how much was left. I only know that a year after we were married, my wife produced a shrunken hovel of wedding cake from the freezer, which we thawed and ate. I detected no rum. It tasted freezery.

 

It’s not news: we're on the threshold of a long silent scream. What's happened to food production in this country? Whatta we got to eat?

 

My first awareness of this skittishness about food came years ago. My grandmother brought home a frying pan coated with Teflon. My grandfather, a cast-iron frying pan man, was skeptical. In the first plate of eggs he ate, he said he could taste the Teflon. "Daddy gets notions," my grandmother said. Bad eggs, he said. Bring back the old pan.

 

He shaved with a straight razor and patted his cheeks with alcohol when he finished, emerging from the bathroom with a shiny chin, smelling clean and flammable. He farmed and drove a rural mail delivery route. He milked six cows year-round, calling them home every evening, tending to them in a manner both businesslike and loving. They stood in their stalls; he sat on a stool next to them and milked. How could something as good as milk come from a space both sweetly redolent of hay and reeking of piss and cow pie? It just did.

 

I became suspicious of our milk a while back. Modern milk, store milk. Industrial milk. It didn't taste good in a glass, in cereal, in coffee, anywhere. I paid $1.99 a gallon at Kroger. It was a plasticky, hormonal imposter. The color was right. Nothing else.

 

Home from college one Friday night, my daughter asked why I didn't buy the good stuff. What good stuff? I said.

 

In time I was converted, not without a fight, to organic milk. I hated the idea. I hated those happy cows on the carton, cows that mooed "just say no." I hated the phony celebration of Farmer Families, which I saw as a crock of advertising bull on par with Amish chickens (some of those birds, I happen to know, are Presbyterian). Mostly I hated paying even more for milk, for something that was supposed to be good and cheap and impossible to adulterate.

 

The first milk I bought, in elementary school, had cost two cents a carton and made sandwiches, cupcakes, and cookies taste better. Do kids even drink milk now? Does milk go with Gogurt and Doritos?

 

Corn cake. Why not?

 

Corn is local. Corn is sweet. It's a tidy food: 800 kernels in 16 rows.

 

It has wide appeal. It's every kid's favorite vegetable. (Except it's not a vegetable. My sources tell me, "Every kernel of corn is a fruit." Whatever. All the better for cake.)

 

Read up on corn and you'll be charmed. Maybe because it's so tall and stately. Unlike humble beans crouching in their fields, corn has stature. It becomes a forest. You can get lost in corn.

 

Read between the lines and you’ll see there’s romance in corn. Not us romancing in the corn. The corn romancing in itself. It grows its own silk; it has tassels that release pollen. On warm July evenings, given a light breeze, there’s a great green orgy taking place in those cornfields, a love-in that Purdue agronomist R.L. Nielsen says can last for up to 14 days. All those Midwesterners sitting on porches long summer nights: they’re not watching the corn grow. It’s way better than that.

 

But corn cake? I'm locovore enough to know that for a January wedding, someone's importing her corn. And what corn is it? Corn in the can? Corn in the freezer? Long-lasting corn that, like an industrial tomato, can wait forever if need be and still be fresh? No food produced today is more messed with than corn.

 

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan tells the story of corn and its transformation, of prodigious gains in yields, from 20 bushels an acre in the 1920s to 200 in the present day. These yields, he reports, are enabled by genetically engineered corn “bred for thicker stalks and stronger root systems, the better to stand upright in a crowd and withstand mechanical harvesting,” and by the dubious miracle of synthetic nitrogen, which has changed everything, the corn plant, the farm, food production and, in no small measure, life on the planet.

 

Once, corn was corn and food was food. Now, who knows? The Iowa corn crops Pollan describes “are basically inedible.”

 

Next night my daughter comes home with another box of cake samples. These are from a different baker. We eat dinner, push back from the table, and turn our attention to sweets.

 

“I’m just afraid people will be weirded out by corn cake,” she says. She hands me a little confection the size of a hockey puck. There are six or seven to try, all with a brownish frosting that reminds me of our wedding cake.

 

“Butter cream?” I ask. Then I take bite.

 

She nods. “Heavenly.”

 

“That can be risky,” my wife says. One bite obliterates her.

 

It’s good. They’re all good. They’re all fruity cakey things. We take turns taking bites and learn that the active ingredient, the animating principle, is Nutella. Somewhere, sometime, a genius had the idea of bringing together chocolate and hazelnut. It was more than inspired food engineering. It was a good marriage. It was art.

 

I ask for another bite and realize I should probably have a glass of expensive post-modern milk. We taste and make a decision. Corn cake, we decide, is out. Regrets to the locovores. Hazelnut/Nutella cake, with apricot filling, is in. It will be sweet and memorable, despite the bloated carbon footprint. Who needs regrets at a wedding?

 

 

Rick Bailey's work has appeared in the The Yale Journal for Humanities and Medicine, Phantom Kangaroo, Bartelby Snopes, and Boston Literary Magazine. He lives in Michigan and teaches writing at a community college in the Detroit area.

 

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