A Meditation on Cakes
WHAT IS THIS, I say to myself, as, seated on an uncharged-for bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, I perceive faint smoke go up beside near-by trees. A tall, grey woman is beside where the smoke ascends; before her is a square, soot-black structure, and I can see that she has a ladle in her hand. Some priestess of a rite that has to be performed on a black altar in the open air, I permit myself to imagine. I look more intently on the scene. A string of people are before the altar-like structure, each with the peculiar intentness of those who are in expectation of some benefit: I watch the sibyl handing each a honey-coloured cake. Thereupon I approach the soot-black structure myself. The sibyl takes pieces of charcoal and puts them on a fire that is within the black square. Beside her is a great can of creamy paste. She takes up a ladleful: pulling out a pan she pours it in; she presses a cover down upon the paste, twists the pan upside down, and deftly pushes it within what is, after all, an oven set amongst trees. She draws it back in a minute; there, with diamond-like punches upon it, is an oblong cake. Shaking sugar on it she hands the cake to the first in line. It is a commercial transaction, I discover: there is an announcement ‘“Gaufres, 80 centimes.” And now I stand in line to receive one, with a soldier who wears a fez, a child who holds a toy-balloon, an old harridan, a very chic lady, and a man wearing velveteen trousers, a muffler and a cap, with an empty sack hanging across his shoulder, who nevertheless looks like an artist, and who (as I was to learn) supports a large family by collecting and marketing ants’ eggs. I receive my gaufre. It is one of those cakes that are puffed into layers of paste; it is very tasty. I discover that it is rather like the American waffle, and am led to guess that “waffle” and “gaufre” are cognate words.
Back on my bench I can think of nothing else than cakes; my stream of consciousness flows around cakes. It is Shrove Tuesday, the eve of Lent. It has always been recognised that the most satisfactory way of preparing for a fast is to have a feast. The best part of a feast, it has always seemed to me, is the part in which cakes have a place; a feast in which no time is wasted getting to the cakes—in which the cakes constitute the feast—is the best of feasts. Pancake Night, Shrove Tuesday, as I discern now, is rightly placed before Ash Wednesday: the happiest feast before the longest fast.
It is true that the cakes eaten on this feast are cakes in their simplest form—to wit, pancakes. But pancakes made by a practised pancake-maker (and there are, the Lord be praised, many such!) make a dish fit for a better man than a king—a dish fit for a sage. When I think of sages eating pancakes, I think of them as eating pancakes made thin and with much butter on their surfaces. As a youth I used to tramp from house to house in a certain district in Ireland on Shrove Tuesday evening. I had forty aunts (well, not quite forty) all adepts in pancake-making, and all living conveniently near to one another. I managed to visit nearly every one of them on Pancake Night.
The best story I ever read has the making of pancakes for its central incident. You will find it in the Thousand and One Nights; not in any of the abbreviated versions; it is somewhere in Burton’s seventeen volumes, or if not in Burton, in Payne, or if not in Burton or Payne, in Monsieur Mardrus’s French version. It is entitled “The Caliph and the Daughter of Kisra.” The central incident, the luminous point which, as Robert Louis Stevenson tells us, should be recognisable in every well-constructed story, is where the Daughter of Kisra is sent pancakes by the Caliph. They are in a silver dish and the Daughter of Kisra, with the generosity that characterises her royal house, has dish and pancakes sent to the young man who gave her a cruse of water when she was in need of refreshment in the streets of Bagdad. The silver dish is offered for sale in the market; the Caliph recognises it, and this leads to very remarkable developments. It may not be the best story ever written, but it is the best instance I know of pattern in story-telling. And the central incident, as I have stated, is the making of the pancakes; they are made by the Caliph himself; Haroun al-Raschid tucks up his sleeves, makes the batter, pours it on the pan, holds it on the brazier, and repeats this over and over until the great silver dish is packed with pancakes. A most memorable incident, I maintain.
I had a grandmother. I don’t remember her pancakes, but I have a distinct memory of a special cake she used to make for me. This cake was named in Irish “Keestha Bosca,” which means “the cake of the palm’’; it had this name because it was shaped in the palm of the maker out of dough left over from baking the bread for next day. In my grandmother’s house (this is a long time ago and things have changed since) most of the bread we ate was baked in the pot-oven at night. Probably the mixing and the kneading and the putting of the dough into the oven took place at no great length of time after candle-light. But to a child lying in bed and keeping awake to watch such proceedings they seemed to be at a very remote time in the night. My grandmother’s bread was mixed in buttermilk and with soda. When it was put in the oven, the coals and ashes of a turf-fire were put around the oven and over it. And on the lid of the pot was placed “the cake of the palm,” after sugar and sweet milk had been placed on the top of it.
I have never lost my taste for cakes. After the cakes of folk-culture such as pancakes and ‘‘the cake of the palm,” came cakes that were still popular but approaching the cakes of higher cultivation: squares of ginger-bread sold off carts at little fairs or in little shops; ginger-cakes which were very vitalizing as one faced a mile of road on a chill evening (in those remote days one could get a bagful for twopence). Later on there was a heavy, clammy cake that one bought in pennyworths—Chester-cake it was called. It was related that the ingredients of this cake were always mixed in beer—in porter—and this rumour added to the worth of the cake, to our minds, by giving it a dark and secret origin. And, still on the border between the cakes of folk-culture and the cakes of higher cultivation, there were spiced cakes and cream tarts.
Then came cakes of the higher cultivation—cakes with icings, cakes with rare fruits crowning them and embedded in them, cakes that are the creations of meditative and daring intelligences. All such cakes are a temptation to me—all, I should say, except cakes that have chocolate outside or inside of them. I think such cakes are mistakes. I see people whose tastes I know to be indisputable eating them, and it is as if I saw them reading the longer poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Chocolate cakes are not for me.
I do not know what ingredients should go into a cake, nor how the ingredients should be combined, nor how the combination should be baked. But I know the temper in which cakes should be made. The temper should be that of affection and light-heartedness. Soups can be made by slaves. Meats may be cooked by mockers and salads mixed by suspicious, cross-eyed servitors. Fish and fowl can be prepared by fleshly men sunk in infamies. But cakes can only be made by the candid. Everyone knows that Cinderella could make cakes and that her jealous half-sisters couldn’t, and it is clear to Shakespearean scholars that Cordelia was a cake-maker. “I offer you cakes and friendship,” said a remarkable lady to me once. She, being the most experienced lady in Dublin, knew that these two went together. I cherish her friendship still and have happy memories of her cakes. And I know a lady in Chicago whose cakes (or should I call them cates?1) are the sort that the Queen of Sheba gave Solomon when full of friendship for him.
I remember that there used to be a cake-maker in this quarter who made cakes in his own little stall. He was a Constantinopolitan; perhaps he made cakes as the Caliph did, tucking up his sleeves and holding the pan above the brazier. But I could not recall his method and was teased into going in search of his stall. Three little shops were together: I remember them; the first sold firewood and had, as is the pleasant fashion in Paris, logs painted all over its front, the round ends showing notches and the grain: intended to be representational, this shining pattern of logs was so stylized as to be symbolic, evoking the lives of wood-cutters dwelling in huts in chiteau-surrounding forests. Almost touching upon this shop was another outside of which were hanging three deep, richly glowing copper basins. The Constantinopolitan’s was between the two. The stall was small and bare: there was in it room for the stove, the kneading-board, the cauldron of oil, and the cake-maker himself. At the back was an unremarkable curtain, behind which, no doubt, birds sang, and fountains played, and odalisques awaited their master. I ordered a couple of his cakes. He punched out a circle in the dough on his kneading-board, and punched a hole in that circle of dough; then he plunged the piece into the cauldron of boiling oil. He took it out, crisp and swollen, oily, ring-shaped, and golden-brown. He made another and put the couple in paper for me. They were the sort that is known in America as doughnuts, and were admirable of their kind.
1 Cate is an archaic form of the word cake. —ed.
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