On Caribbean Christmas Cake and Family

Once I left residence for faculty nearly 20 years in the past, I stole my mom’s recipe e-book. I used to be transferring from Jamaica to Canada, the primary time I’d be away from my mother and father for greater than a summer time. I knew her recipes would heat me on the northern winter days and convey consolation every time I felt homesick. Mother’s Steno pad, circa 1968, is crammed with handwritten recipes that she realized both in home-ec class, from her mom, or by watching televised cooking exhibits. Within the margins she has written her personal hacks, substitutions, and addenda. Every recipe, from the lime-rice pudding to cornmeal pancakes to the boozy steamed Jamaican Christmas cake, had been repeatedly examined and family-approved. 

When she informed me the e-book was lacking, I feigned incredulity. “However the place might it have gone? You know the way issues in that home like to develop legs!” Then, one summer time, when she visited me in Toronto, she discovered it and, with out a phrase, took it again along with her to Jamaica. Once I found it had gone lacking, I simply smiled. (Truthful play, Mother, honest play.)  This started a years-long tug-of-war—every of us stealing the e-book again every time we visited each other. 

A good friend who’s aware about this decades-long battle as soon as requested me: “Why don’t you simply scan it?” He missed the purpose. You see, there’s one thing about holding that vanilla extract-stained, moth-eaten e-book that connects me to my college-aged mom. These are recipes that wooed my father, who can be a unbelievable prepare dinner. Tales of mom’s school days are fascinating to me. She and her roommates had an “unlawful” hotplate and made scrumptious meals that they might eat whereas stitching clothes for the weekly Friday evening social. I had no such school expertise however every time I opened the e-book, I felt that I did. However above all, amongst the pages turned sepia from time and use, I come again repeatedly to her Christmas Cake. 

Caribbean Christmas Cake (additionally referred to as black cake for its dark-as-pitch hue) is integral to how of us within the area have fun the winter holidays. It’s not Christmas with out this wealthy pastry, redolent with rum, molasses, fruit, and spice. Dizzyingly costly to arrange, it seems solely on the most particular of events—primarily holidays and weddings. A New York Occasions article extolling its advantage described the act of giving a slice, a lot much less a complete cake, as “a deeply affectionate gesture.” I couldn’t agree extra.

To totally recognize why black cake is so revered within the Caribbean, we are able to look way back to historic Rome, the place the primary identified fruitcake recipe appeared over 2,000 years in the past.  Containing pomegranate seeds, pine nuts, and barley, this sturdy loaf was used as sustenance—the unique vitality bar, if you’ll. In direction of the tip of the Center Ages, yeasted and wheat-based “fruited breads,” like at the moment’s panettone, panforte, and stollen, loved rising recognition in Europe. By the mid-1400s, the traditional cake had efficiently traversed the English Channel and the British started making their very own steamed model, plum pudding.

By the 1620s, the British had begun to occupy the Caribbean, utilizing islands like Saint Chistopher (now Saint Kitts), Barbados, and finally Jamaica as strategic army bases and important outposts within the period’s brutal Transatlantic slave commerce. Enslaved cooks have been anticipated to duplicate the recipe utilizing whichever substances have been accessible. There have been no apples, brandy, whisky, apricots, or pomegranates within the area, however what they did have was African ingenuity, molasses, sugar, spices, dried fruit like raisins and prunes, and barrels of rum. What these cooks made exceeded the plantocracy’s expectations; by the slave commerce, this new black cake recipe unfold like wildfire all through the Dutch-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean. 

In the identical method that curries differ in South Asian households, black cake recipes vary throughout the Caribbean diaspora. Some are made nearly completely of dried fruit, whereas some have only a smattering; others fall someplace within the center. Nearly each Jamaican who bakes claims to have the most effective black cake recipe. Mine has gained two native baking competitions, so I really feel significantly justified in holding that perception!
Some of us (together with my mother) prefer to stew their dried fruit in fortified wine and rum earlier than getting older it for a full 12 months. I, ever the hack-loving, time-crunched millennial, consider in boiling the fruit in an array of alcohols, then letting it sit in a single day earlier than utilizing. (You thought I’d say use it as quickly because it’s cool? By no means! I’m simply lazy, not barbaric.)

Mother concedes that my cake has a greater taste, however that hers has a superior texture. That’s as a result of she provides floor peanuts and breadcrumbs to her batter. Why didn’t I do know this for nearly 20 years, you ask? It seems the web page with these secret substances had been ripped out and tucked in the midst of one among her school textbooks—fittingly, Caribbean Cookery. For the previous three Christmases, I’ve merged our two recipes, and we’ve managed to create one thing much more spectacular. 

Perfumed with overproof Jamaican rum, Guinness, brandy, creme de cassis, dry sherry, and a Jamaican fortified wine referred to as Purple Label, this boozy cake shouldn’t be for youths. If you happen to’re on a finances, which I actually have been at completely different instances through the years, you may nonetheless obtain a tasty black cake with out the sherry and cassis. Although semi-steamed, the feel of this deal with shouldn’t be fairly a cake, but it’s not as dense as a British-style steamed pudding both. When sliced, every portion ought to feather, like a top quality cheesecake. The crumb must be delicate and the flavour strong.

Black cake is steeped in symbolism and historical past. Every chunk is not only a carnival of taste that commemorates Christmas within the Caribbean. It’s additionally a candy reminder of the worth our ancestors paid for our freedom. My household doesn’t have conventional heirlooms; apart from some land, there’s nothing tangible left behind from my grandparents. Moreover my mother and father’ marriage ceremony crystal and mahogany furnishings, there’s nothing that I can anticipate to inherit. Nonetheless, this Christmas cake recipe is part of the Grey household legacy—one thing that I’ll carry in my coronary heart. Simply wanting on the tattered cowl of that Steno pad, I can hear our laughter, her jibing, and really feel the hugs we shared as we waited for the desserts to bake.

Recipes

Jamaican Christmas Cake

Get the recipe >