Full: Carrot Cake
and tariffs, kitchen gardens and sweet potatoes
I remember Carol Kinnerk as moon pale, knobby-kneed and gregarious. The sun not only pulled copper through her otherwise unremarkable brown hair but also small freckles to the surface of her kind, milky face. She shared sly grownup jokes with my mother and they laughed easily together. Mom would lean in and whisper something that required rolled eyes and Mrs. Kinnerk would throw her head back and howl. “Oh, Jacky!,” all nasally vowels and clacking teeth on consonants. I encouraged this friendship not because theirs was a beacon of cross-racial sisterhood during the culturally-fraught mid-seventies, but because Mrs. Kinnerk had a pool.
Growing up in Fort Wayne Indiana, my brother and I had been lucky enough on occasion to have swum in hotel pools where, unlike at the public pool, our Marcos and Polos had true explorer’s range and were not completely decimated by the chaotic din of other kids’ games. However, Mrs. Kinnerk’s was the only private pool to which we had had access at that point in our young lives. It was a strangeness we embraced by splashing, cannon balling, handstanding, and screaming with enough energy to make up for the absence of our neighborhood peers. Lavishly chlorinated, you could smell the pool walking up the cement path from the driveway, its bleachy punch promising so much sunburnt fun. It was a long, rectangular stretch of sky, and its sparkling, still surface invited. The pool’s gleaming white tiles were endless unlined index cards. There was a board at the deep end on which we were not allowed. Mrs Kinnnerk’s own children barely registered during our visits. A few years older than us, they usually retreated to their rooms after dutiful greetings in the living room. I don’t remember their names and I don’t remember minding that they never wanted to swim with us. For the next several hours, or until the plastic cups of wine spritzers were sipped dry, the entire turquoise sea in Mrs. Kinnerk’s treeless backyard was ours to explore.
Easy laughs aside, my mother was proud and always made sure that apart from the pool water, we were completely self-sufficient for those visits. Large duffels were crammed with flip flops, extra towels, books and crayons, dry clothes to change into after, and lunch enough for the four of us. Peanut butter and strawberry jam or tuna salad sandwiches, chips or cheetos, and Little Debbie oatmeal pies were swaddled in paper towels and tucked between the shorts and sandals. One of these swim visits, as my brother and I finished our sandwiches, towels wrapped around our dripping shoulders like granny shawls, Mrs. Kinnerk asked if we’d like some cake instead of our usual packaged sweets. I’m sure our eyes grew big at the offer, making it difficult for our mom to decline. She returned from the house with two squares of white frosted orangey-brown cake centered on daisy-printed Corelle saucers. This is my first memory of carrot cake.
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I am cake-curious and always reading, trying or dreaming up recipes that evoke new flavor stories but those cakes that are what I consider or have learned are representative of Black southern traditions hold the steady center of my cakework, whether it be baking, writing, or workshop. Pound, yellow, red velvet, coconut, hummingbird, rum, caramel, pineapple upside down and jam cakes are among those that populate my canon although we all know someone's aunt or grandmother who was known for their angel food, German chocolate, or spice cake. Carrot cake lands on these outer banks for me. It’s delicious. I just don’t bake it or come across it often.
An informal survey through the indices of my albeit limited cookbook collection reflected only occasional appearances as well. Sister Effie Artis contributed a carrot cake recipe to Spoonbread, Cheryl Day includes one with spiced cream cheese frosting in her first cookbook, and Sallie Ann Robinson features a favorite recipe in Gullah Home Cooking, but she, like many bakers I know, doctors hers up to inch the cake closer to a regional or circum-Caribbean flavor story. She adds pineapple, but coconut, pecans, a rum soak or sometimes all of the above are used to accomplish this. At this point, of course, it’s easy to imagine many bakers making the practical decision to skip the odious carrot shredding and simply bake a preacher cake already. Mrs. Kinnerk’s cake was studded with raisins (of course) but was an otherwise sober affair, carrot heavy, with an almost pudding-like texture, and a schmear of vanilla scented cream cheese frosting, served cold, right out of the fridge.
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On a whim, I checked the index of Adrian Miller’s Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time for “cake” (“see poundcake”) and “carrot.” Historical context for the carrot comes up in the chapter on Candied Yams. Reading this chapter in tandem with the early chapters of David Shields’ Southern Provisions: The Creation & Revival of a Cuisine extended a glimpse of colonial trade and racialized foodways that still reverberate. It also hinted at why a sweet potato pound cake might be a more likely repast or reunion offering than a carrot cake.
Miller is quick first of all, to distinguish between what he calls a “true yam” (the root of tropical plants of the genus Dioscorea, that serves in its many varieties as a West African staple, the one pounded for fufu) and a sweet potato (Ipomoea batata, with a domestication date of at least 2000 B.C.E. in Peru). Terminology sorted, he clarifies that our iconic candied yams, precooked, then caramelized in butter and sugar, are actually sweet potatoes. He goes on to note that “how African-Americans prepare candied yams is the legacy of fancy European recipes for carrots, not a contemporary adaptation of the way West Africans prepare true yams. When soul foodies ‘yam it up,’ they’re standard-bearers for upper-class English and French cooking, not West African cooking (p. 167).”
Carrots and sweet potatoes are kindred spirits, earthy, vegetal, flexible and easy-going…orange, but above all, sweet, especially when cooked. For centuries, carrots have been used in European recipes for soups, stews and savory dishes but also as sweetening agents in puddings, tarts and yes, eventually cakes. Sweet potatoes were an “exotic import” from the Americas by the sixteenth century and Europeans, who valued their sweetness, used them in “dishes whose structure and spicing were identical to those of traditional carrot preparations (p. 172).” The English carrot pudding became yam pudding in some early cookbooks for example. These early cookbooks perpetuated the foodways that were followed by aspiring home cooks in the American colonies and demanded of enslaved kitchen staff. Both groups of cooks likely prepared “interchangeable carrot and sweet potato recipes.”
While Miller’s project frames Black (soul) food as national cuisine and traces the process of mainstreaming through complicated histories, Shields’ project is one of bioregional recovery. A couple of points he makes early on stand out for me and enter into interesting conversation with Miller’s take on the carrot-sweet potato parallelisms. First, Shields notes that while states, as staple colonies, would have been known for particular crops or food items (Carolina rice, Virginia ham, Georgia yams (sweet potatoes), the sectionalist understanding of “The South” as a region politically, culturally and agriculturally united and distinct did not gel until the passage of the Tariff of 1828, the so -called Tariff of Abominations. This tariff taxed imported goods with the intention of protecting northern industries but it “threatened the English importation of cotton and forced the slave states to pay more for goods that they imported (p. 25).”
Second, up until that Tariff was passed, the seed market for the kitchen gardens across the South was a transatlantic one, with most of the seed for common vegetables like cabbage, beans and carrots coming from London via local grocers and small shops. Shields suggests that “to speak of the garden as being somehow expressive of a region was nonsense when one looked at the origins of the seed. How the seed suited the soil and climate–that was local (p. 39).” He does note that also local were “plants propagated by sets and slips” such as onions and potatoes (including sweet) and “cultivars that operated submarket in their seed production and distribution (p. 39, italics mine).” And this seems a key moment to underscore the importance of the Black garden and skill of the Black gardener in shaping the foodways of a region.
Miller cites an Englishman in colonial Virginia who wrote that the gardens of the enslaved “have carrets, potatoes, and yams (sweet potatoes).” He surely noticed those crops with which he was familiar or those he was interested in. Enslaved gardeners by necessity grew what they could–what they could access and what suited soil and climate. They must have experimented constantly –with seeds, sets, and slips, thereby playing an outsized role in establishing the practices and possibility through which local cultivars like okra and collards could be produced and distributed “submarket.”
For all the creativity and experimentation of the Black garden, sweet potatoes were a constant–a “critical survival food” through slavery and sharecropping, one that was “totemic…to rural and urban blacks at the turn of the twentieth century” and finally, adds Miller, “centuries after black and white southerners figured it out, the broader American public is now catching on to the fact that the sweet potato is a ‘superfood’ (p. 174-183).”
***
Where I live in Conyers isn’t a food desert, but it is what I would call a food depression. We’re too far out for urban CSA delivery, too far in for rural CSA delivery and while there are multiple grocery stores, they’re all crappy. They’re each a little dingy, with vegetables wilting, rotting, or shrink-wrapped in plastic. The freshest food (at least at our local Publix) is the fried chicken churned out regularly by the deli department. A month or two ago, I found a CSA that could deliver to my work office and signed us up, excited for fresh produce, but also to get more of a feel for what’s grown locally and what’s seasonal. The first four or five deliveries brought beautiful lettuces, spring onions, CSA challenge items like purple kohlrabi, and lovely locally grown strawberries. Also, lots of carrots. Lots. Every week. After inadvertently stockpiling a bright orange, crispy sweet bushel, I did what one must. I made a three-layer cake.
As I compared recipes to cobble together my own, the realization arose: minus the raisins, Miss Kinnerk’s carrot cake was my blueprint. I wanted to foreground the sweetness and earthiness of the carrots, saving the tropical distraction of the coconut, pineapple, and rum and textural business of the nuts and dried fruit for other cakes. I browned butter in place of oil and, inspired by a new cookbook on baking with mother grains, added whole wheat flour. To the usual spice pairing of cinnamon and nutmeg, I added ginger, clove and black tea. I brushed layers with a traditional buttermilk glaze and added caramelized white chocolate for depth of flavor and sturdiness to the cream cheese frosting that so often is either goopy or gritty. The cake was fragrant with a pudding-like crumb, and on the second day, once the flavors had been given time to meld, delicious cold, straight out of the fridge. Mrs. Kinnerk would be proud.
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Tariffs are again reshaping the country, our standing in the world and the way we eat. When I bake, I am hungry to try a world of ingredients but these quickly evolving trade wars and all the other recidivist and environmentally devastating policies that have been shoved out these last months encourage me to focus closer to home. This political moment affords us the opportunity to imagine bioregionalism in ways that are mutually supportive, not divisive. Maybe more about right relationship and repair than historical recovery per se. Eating is an agricultural act as Wendell Berry reminds us, and also a political one. I’m taking small steps. My kitchen garden is not particularly practical and I don’t know that it necessarily mirrors the region. Lots of tomatoes, yes, but also herbs and edible flowers for salads, cucumbers, strawberries, blueberries and fennel—with beans and peppers soon to follow. Next year, who knows? Maybe sweet potatoes with extras banked for a long winter.
What are you growing now? How are you nourishing yourself and others? xx