Rouses_May-June-2018

the Eat Local issue

MEMORY LANE by Emily Blejwas + photos by Meredith Foltynowicz

A s the story goes, sometime in the late 1800s, Emma Rylander Lane left her native city of Americus, Georgia, and moved with her husband to the town of Clayton, Alabama. It was there that she created a four-layer white cake made with flour, baking powder, butter, sugar, egg whites and vanilla. She spread a heated mixture of egg yolks, butter, sugar, raisins, whiskey and vanilla between the layers and frosted the whole cake with a boiled, fluffy white

icing. When she entered it in a baking competition at a county fair in Columbus, Georgia, the cake took first prize, so Lane named it Prize cake . But a friend later convinced her to lend her own name to the dessert, and so the cake appeared as Lane cake in Lane’s cookbook, Some Good Things to Eat , self-published in 1898. The modern cake had recently made its debut, thanks to the widespread availability of white flour and the invention of baking powder: a quick, easy and reliable alternative

to yeast. Baking powder revolutionized cake making, which took on a particular fervor in the South, where for centuries “a Southern cook’s reputation was judged more by her baking than any other culinary endeavor,” wrote food historian Damon Lee Fowler in Classical Southern Cooking . Baking powder rendered cake layers airy and fine, so to avoid losing the richness of the old English-style cakes, Southern bakers added dense fillings of fruit and nuts between the cake layers instead of

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY MAY | JUNE 2018