Making Buttermilk Pound Cake
aka another communication with god
This beautiful writing by Diana Limbach Lempel got me thinking in new (old) ways about cooking and food and group experiments and history as literally, materially, constituting our present. (I would describe this as some themes on the Cancer / Capricorn axis of the zodiac.)
Last weekend my sister made our Nana’s pound cake recipe again, for her wife’s birthday. (Happy birthday Dal and all our Pisces contingent!) We were sick (again) so we didn’t attend the party but she brought some of the cake over in foil, as we do for each other. Kyle, my husband, ate the cake, and I felt such satisfaction and relief that he was eating it. I was too sick, as in it didn’t even sound good to me, but I feel this sort of outsized desire for people to eat that cake when it gets made. Like a nourisher in me comes out and I just want it to nourish, in all the ways that cake can.
My sister texted me that she made the cake, and reminded me it was the first time one of us had made the cake since our Nana died last summer, at 94. It felt more significant to make the cake now that she’s moved beyond her body. But even when she was alive, making the cake has been a way of bringing her vibes, her spirit, and the positive, generative, alive aspects of our ancestry into the present. There’s a lot to critique and not pass on from both threads of my ancestry, but making her recipes feels like exactly what I want to carry on.
Diana’s writing got me thinking about what a recipe is! A transmission, perhaps, a communication that is meant to support you in replicating conditions of a certain feeling. An estado de animo, I just learned, which feels more complete somehow than “mood.” And yet it’s the most ordinary thing, so everyday. But a way of carrying something, a set of things - conscious and unconscious, that gets lived in the present.
For years I could not keep (in fact right now I don’t even think I have a copy of) this recipe, I would text my mom or sister to ask for it when I was making it, for someone’s birthday usually. (Thanks mom and sister for always responding quickly with the whole thing.) I remember it visually on a recipe card from a box my mom had, with flour or crusted egg on it and some dessert graphic from the recipe card set from the 80s.
This cake was at both my wedding and my sister’s wedding.
The first summer I met Kyle, we rode our bikes across Europe and I turned 37. He rode around Berlin in secret trying to get all the ingredients for this cake, (including buttermilk and cisco haahahaha) and made perhaps the most beautiful version yet, for me to have a piece of home while I was afar. He has not baked many things since I’ve known him, but of course he made an immaculate Virgo version. My sister and I were perplexed on how he got the cake to not stick to the pan. He said, I just followed the instructions to grease the pan, then put flour on the grease. Both of us had been making it so many times, and somehow not seen or read this detail of the instructions. Hahahahaha.
Somehow these versions of the story, the recipe, build the recipe’s meaning, like it becomes a metonym for the best parts of our family story. Recently our aunt came to visit, and when she showed up in my living room with two books about birds wrapped for my kids, I started unexpectedly sobbing. She looks and sounds so much like my dad, and she’s so generous with the kids. She has a way where she lets them be who they are so effortlessly. It’s rare to see adults (boomer adults especially) treating children this way. My dad stopped speaking to me and my sister without notice two years ago, so her presence has a different meaning now. And I find myself less prone to taking anyone’s presence in my life for granted. I never thought my family story would go this way, with my dad especially. One of the side effects of my dad’s absence is my appreciation for people who do show up has really deepened.
I’m not exactly sure how all this connects, but the cake feels like a big part of it. Recipes and food and transmissions, conscious and unconscious. Maybe it’s cooking right now - its’ the only thing I do in my life which feels like it’s explicitly, measurably making people’s lives better? I do feel that in my work (for which I am beyond lucky) but it feels a little harder to measure or describe, it’s not as certain as a bowl of soup.
Lately the moments where I feel the least existential and shut down about the state of the world is when I’m cooking for someone. Meal trains are my favorite hobby lately. I was going to say “act of service” instead of hobby but it really doesn’t feel like it’s an act of service. It’s a meditation on life, and therefore serving me. To get the existential relief of making food for people who need it in some way, to provide a clearly useful thing, is really a spiritual gift on the level of - I’m not sure it gets much better. Than to show up and bring food to someone else’s house. That’s my main form of participation outside of work and my immediate family tending these days. I read Rebecca Solnit’s newsletter and sob and make food for others and myself. As an act of faith. As a way of saying, I’m still here, god. I don’t understand, and I probably won’t come to understand *all this,* but I come to the kitchen to participate, and as a way of praying for what the next step might be.
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That’s what I’ve got today, may it be of use to you in some way!
Another way I aspire to be of use is through my business - the business of doing astrology readings. I have some spots now, this month, available!
Many blessings to you, especially of existential relief today,
Sarah