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Cakewalk: A Memoir - Hardcover

Moses, Kate

 
9780385342988: Cakewalk: A Memoir
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385342985 ISBN 13: 9780385342988
Verlag: DIAL PR, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

The American Book Award-winning co-author of Mothers Who Think reveals how baking enabled her to face personal difficulties and expand her horizons, in a recipe-complemented account that includes descriptions of such experiences as the time she baked brownies for M. F. K. Fisher.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hailed as “a new writer of startling, lyrical intensity” by The Times Literary Supplement, Kate Moses received the 2003 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize as well as a Prix des Lectrices de Elle for Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, published in a dozen languages. While a senior editor and contributing writer for Salon, Moses co-founded the popular daily feature “Mothers Who Think” and co-edited two anthologies of essays on motherhood, the nationally bestselling, American Book Award–winning Mothers Who Think: Tales of Real-Life Parenthood and Because I Said So: 33 Mothers Write About Children, Sex, Men, Aging, Faith, Race & Themselves. She lives in San Francisco. For more recipes, stories, and baking tips, visit the Cakewalk blog at www.katemoses.com.

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Chapter One


Let Them Eat Cake

I held my arms up high, honey-colored hair tumbling to my waist, eyes squinched shut against the scratchy fall of new fabric, and my mother pulled the dress she’d made for me all the way down over my head. I was not quite four, and I’d been invited over to play for the first time by a child who lived across the street.

It was 1965 in Palo Alto, California, a sleepy middle-class suburb of shiny modern Eichler homes and leaf-shaded cul-de-sacs like the one we’d just moved to, full of young hopeful families like ours. My dad was a brand new lawyer working hard to prove himself at his first job; my mother, who’d dropped out of college to get married, was a housewife raising three children under the age of five. People told her she looked just like a young Elizabeth Taylor, she looked just like Jackie Kennedy, and she did, but even prettier. She had wanted to be an artist, her relentless creativity redirected into sewing curtains and clothes for our family, gardening, teaching herself to reupholster hand-me-down furniture, concocting elaborate birthday parties and messy art projects for my brothers and me. That day she was still unpacking boxes and, I suspect, as relieved to have one of us out of the house for an hour or two as she was anxious to make a good impression on our new neighbors.

She brushed my long hair and tied it with a bow to one side, princess- style, then crouched in front of me, curving her elegant hands on either side of my ribs, rocking me playfully and smoothing my dress, which matched the one she’d made for herself—mother-and-daughter dresses in red-and-black paisley, rickrack sewn along the hems. And before me, her face: eager, lovely, her wide green eyes coy and glittering, as if she knew some secret she’d share eventually, and if I was the lucky one, only with me. Her black hair was so soft and fine it felt like baby’s hair, softer and far darker than mine or my brothers’. Her smile was both excited and encouraging.

“Ready, Cis?” she asked.

I was named after my mother, but nobody in my family ever called me Kathleen, not once; it is still a name I hardly recognize as my own. I was called Cissy, the sister, though my mother had other roles for me, other nicknames. “You’re my Little Mommy,” she declared when I brought a damp cloth for her head; she’d been crying on our sofa in graduate student housing, pregnant with the baby who became my younger brother, the third baby in three years. “You take good care of me,” she said, accepting a bite of the cookie I held to her mouth, “you’re my best friend.” I was her best friend—I’d been chosen, I was important. “We’re the only girls. We have to stick together.”

Little Mommy, best friend, the only girl, the sister. Now I was the family ambassador. My mother took my hand and trotted me across our Palo Alto street, swinging my arm under the movie blue sky, the omniscient camera’s wide-angle lens capturing the picture-perfect scene of our idyllic neighborhood, our charming family, the beautiful talented young mother and her compliant tidy daughter, the little mommy taking good care.

The neighbor girl’s name is a blank to me, and I can’t recall what we played. What I remember is the two of us lured to her kitchen by the intoxicating odor of caramelized sugar, and finding that her mother had vanished. What remained was a ceramic baking dish on the countertop breathing out hot, honeyed scent. There was a ring of burnt brown paper holding up a mound of what looked like burnished swirls of cloud. And that glorious smell! We leaned in from either side of the counter, perched on barstools on our bare knees, our noses almost touching the crisp edge of the paper.

We knew it would be wrong to eat whatever excelsior thing this was. But we leaned in farther, our toes flexed on the seats of the canting barstools, our elbows on the countertop of that spotless avocado-green kitchen, at first promising each other that we would only have a taste. A cloud of hesitation passed across the little girl’s face. And this is where the story starts to become mine.

Just one taste, I assured her. Each.

I remember turning toward the sound of the little girl’s mother pausing in the doorway to her kitchen, the sharp sound of her gasp: a laundry basket under her arm, her eyes as wide as mine must have been. The neighbor girl’s hand and my own were wrist-deep in the dish, wiping out the last moist flecks with our fingertips. We had eaten the entire succulent, mellifluous thing with our hands, and we’d licked the paper clean, too.

What was that? I was thinking as I burst out the neighbor girl’s front door and skittered across her lawn, her mother still on the phone shrieking to my mother, my sticky hair flying behind me and my stiff new dress flapping, my mother erupting out of our house across the street and running toward me, a look of abject mortification on her heart-shaped face.

I knew I had been very bad. I knew I was going to be punished, maybe even spanked. But I didn’t care. Whatever it was, whatever that voluptuous thing was, it had been worth it. What was it? I was still wondering later, after my father had come home. That baked thing, that glazed and golden and sumptuous thing—I wanted it again. And again. And again. I lay on my bed, my bottom sore, sucking the last ambrosial flavor from my candied hair.

it’s not that i’d never had cake or cookies or candy or ice cream before. Sugar was the mainstay of my diet as a child, present in some abundant form at virtually every meal. My family ate sugar morning, noon, and night: Apple butter oozed out of the omelets, Ding Dongs and soda cans rolled around in our lunchboxes, foil-sealed packets of honey were served alongside the Kentucky Fried Chicken we ate for dinner in front of the TV, before we proceeded inexorably to dessert. My mother stockpiled soft drinks by the case and Halloween-sized bags of candy year-round in our garage, regularly replenishing a freezer the dimensions of a Roman tomb with stacked boxes of packaged snack cakes, frozen pies, and gallon tubs of ice cream. Even my father, whose personal austerity rivaled that of any Buddhist monk, was a donut pusher who kept Baby Ruth bars under the rolled-up socks in his underwear drawer. At six I dreamt one night that I awoke in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother, and by the blue light of the moon shining through our window I opened every bureau drawer and found them overflowing with a pirate’s booty of pink-frosted cupcakes and candy necklaces and pinwheel lolly pops and candy apples glittering like enormous red gemstones. I doubted I’d ever have a more rapturous dream.

As my childhood unfolded, sweetness of the less tangible variety was harder to come by. My parents were disastrously mismatched, too preoccupied by their individual misery and desperate compensations to recognize what havoc they were wreaking on our family. It was one thing to be surrounded by cataracts of sugar, day in, day out; it was quite another to think you had a right to enjoy it, or anything else. I looked for sweetness wherever I could find it.

All my life I’ve been teased for my cake obsession, my compulsive sweet tooth, my therapeutic baking, my repetitive and single-minded quests for the perfect pound cake or the perfect shortbread, my judgment of neighborhoods and vacation spots based on the quality of the local bakeries as much as the local bookstores. Here and there I’ve found allies, but mostly I’ve had to fight off a feeling of furtive criminality when it comes to cake: my baking of it, eating of it, wanting...

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Verlag
DIAL PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385342985
ISBN 13 
9780385342988
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
350
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Verantwortliche Person
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