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CARROT CAKE ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT DISPLAY CASE VIEW:

a Bundt pan, and you can even make monkey bread in a Bundt pan. You can drizzle it with ganache, frost it completely with Swiss meringue, stud it with chocolate chips, and it’s all still a Bundt cake. There’s even an entire chain of cake stores called Nothing Bundt Cakes that sell, well, nothing but different types of Bundt cakes.

War South, the ‘cakewalk’ was an exaggerated dance the enslaved performed near their cabins or in the woods to mock the ballroom pretensions displayed by the plantation aristocracy. At the end of an evening of strutting, twirling canes, and tipping top hats, a prize was presented to the winning couple… a towering, extra-sweet coconut cake,” writes Toni Tipton-Martin in her James Beard Award-winning book, Jubilee . “Like so many things associated with plantation social life, coconut cake eventually became a centerpiece of African American special occasions, reserved for weddings, funerals, church suppers and Christmastime.” The first recorded mention of a coconut cake-like dessert is in 1881’s What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking by Abby Fisher, a former slave who moved from Alabama to San Francisco. By 1904, The Blue Grass Cookbook by Minnie Fox and John Fox, Jr. penned a recipe for a fluffy coconut layer cake that closely resembles what we recognize presently as the celebration-time favorite. Today, some home cooks love to add a layer of lemon curd to their coconut cake; others triple-up the coconut flavor with coconut extract, coconut cream, and coconut milk; and many still wouldn’t dare touch a family heirloom recipe out of superstition. But it’s undeniable that coconut cake remains the grand dame of Southern events and inextricably linked to the region’s history — no matter how you decide to spin your grandma’s classic recipe.

A cream cheese-slathered cake featuring a warmly cinnamon-spiced batter with shredded carrots woven in alongside walnuts, pecans, or (optional and controversial) raisins. ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT THE SWEET STORY: Even though we mostly relegate vegetables to savory roles in 2021 (when’s the last time you saw broccoli ice cream?), carrots have a long and diverse history of being made into desserts. That’s because they’re, well, pretty sweet. One of the oldest recorded instances of a sweetened carrot dish — and assuredly an ancestor to the carrot cake — is the carrot pudding of the Middle Ages. A recipe recorded in 1584’s A Book of Cookrye gives instructions for how to make a pudding in a “carret” root: Take your carret root and scrape it fair, then take a fine knife and cut out all the meat that is within the roote and make it hollow. The recipe does call for the addition of meat — much like mincemeat pies of the day — but mimics many of the same flavor profiles of modern carrot cakes: cloves, dates, mace (aka nutmeg), butter, flour, and sugar. Carrots have been enormously popular in desserts across all social classes in the United States and Europe, from the French aristocracy on down, despite an erroneous widespread belief their popularity is a result of lower-income families looking for ways to sweeten desserts without prohibitively expensive sugar. George Washington ate carrot tea cake at Fraunces Tavern on British Evacuation Day. It was baked into pastry in the form of elaborate carrot pies during the Victorian Era. Carrots have long been as much a sweet “delicacy” reserved for special occasion as any cherry or plum. The first recorded instance of carrot cake in a cookbook is Richard Dolby’s The Cook’s Dictionary and Housekeeper’s Directory (1830) where, among other steps, Dolby instructs to “make a cream patisserie, with about half a pint of milk; and

COCONUT CAKE ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT DISPLAY CASE VIEW:

A multi-layer white or yellow cake with coconut cream filling, covered in white “seven-minute” frosting, and coated in shredded coconut flakes (preferably toasted or sweetened). ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT THE SWEET STORY: Outside of football tailgates and the saying “Bless your heart!” there are few things more Southern than coconut cake — particularly for the Black community. Enslaved Africans brought the knowledge of how to use coconut in dishes — cracking them open, scraping the flesh — with them to the United States, and port cities like Charleston and New Orleans were some of the first to see this labor- intensive ingredient incorporated into savory dishes, candies and cakes. “Coconut cakes have long been associated with the South... [and] Old Charleston records show that a pastry chef by the name of Catherine Joor had 400 pounds of coconut in her possession at her death in 1773,” writes Bryn in American Cakes . Coconut cakes are also a pivotal part of the history of the “cakewalk” — an activity now most commonly associated with school fundraisers and church picnics. “In the pre-Civil

42 ROUSES NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2021