History in the Baking

Black Forest Cake

Display case view: A multi-tiered chocolate sponge cake with layers of fluffy whipped cream and boozy cherries decorated with puffs of whipped cream, chocolate shavings, and maraschino cherries.

The sweet story: With a Victorian gothic color palette of deep ember, moody burgundy, and wispy white, it comes as no surprise that Black Forest cake — also called the Black Forest gateau — hails from a region of Southwestern Germany rich in lush woodlands and folklore galore. But despite what one might think, the cake isn’t named for the region itself, but for a sweet-tart cherry liqueur called kirschwasser (“cherry water” in German, sometimes called kirsch) that’s made by distilling morello cherries, a cousin to the sour cherry, twice, using a complete (stones and all) fermentation process. For a Black Forest cake to have “official” status in the eyes of the German government, this liquored-up cherry extract and the fruit it’s made from must be used. As the cake has been exported around the world, everything from rum-soaked cherries to cherry preserves have taken the place of this often hard-to-find ingredient. Like most historic desserts, there’s quite a bit of debate about its origin. By the mid-1800s, Kirschwasser was widely produced across the Black Forest region, and the fermented cherries often found their way into — or spooned atop — cakes. But in 1915, the most widely held account is that pastry chef Josef Keller created the original Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte (“Black Forest cherry torte”) at a café just outside of Bonn, then passed along the recipe to apprentice August Schaefer, whose descendants have long laid claim to the “original” Black Forest cake at their restaurant in Triberg. Due to its fairytale-like appearance and locally sourced kirsch-spiked decadence, the cake was widely recreated and reimagined as a dessert across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland by the 1930s, and then saw a resurgence as a European dinner party favorite in the 1970s. An annual festival in Todtnauberg celebrating the cake allows amateurs and experts alike to show off new innovations in Black Forest gateau-making each year. (Once, a version made inside a tin can stole the show.) The festival also spotlights an odd cultural coincidence. The bollenhut is a traditional women’s hat from the region, comprising a flat piece of felt, large pompoms, and a ribbon for tying the hat under one’s chin. The red pompoms worn by young, unmarried girls closely resemble the cherries on top of a Black Forest cake, while married women wear hats with black pompoms. The mystery remains whether the hats are an inspiration for the cake’s appearance, but they are pretty similar. In 2021, the festival went virtual, allowing more than 100 bakers to have their cakes judged remotely by a panel of regional pastry experts. If you want to compete next year, I’d suggest distilling your cherries now (and making your own bollenhut). Pairs well with: Double down on the cherry flavor by sipping a small glass of Kirschwasser or cherry brandy.

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German Chocolate Cake

Display case view: A three- or four-tiered chocolate cake layered with a boiled custard coconut-pecan filling — which also traditionally decorates the top of the cake — and (maybe) chocolate frosting.

The sweet story: A lot of things in this world have misleading labels. A jellyfish is neither made of jelly nor a fish. A peanut isn’t a nut; it’s a legume. And German chocolate cake isn’t German; it’s from Texas. Yes, despite having “German” right there in the name, German chocolate cake has no European roots — but does have plenty of ties to the Lone Star State. A little sleuthing by the Dallas Morning News found that the first-ever printed recipe for German chocolate cake ran in their pages as part of famed food editor Julie Bendell’s “Recipe of the Day” column in June 1957. In the submission from Mrs. George Clay of Southeast Dallas, the local homemaker called the cake “German’s Sweet Chocolate Cake” (note the possessive form) after the type of chocolate used to create it: Baker’s German’s Sweet Chocolate. The chocolate itself was named after a confectioner named Samuel German, who invented the style while working for Baker’s Chocolate way back in 1852. What’s more, it calls for the use of buttermilk in making the layer cakes: a clear giveaway that a Southern recipe is afoot. When syndicated, the cake’s popularity spread from coast to coast, losing the possessive name along the way and leaving us with the sticky, nutty dessert we now know as German chocolate cake. People forgot so quickly about the cake’s origin that — in a truly bizarre twist of fate — proud Texan former President Lyndon B. Johnson served the cake to German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard as a “German” dessert at his Johnson City ranch during a 1963 meeting. (No official report on how that went over.) Perhaps to make the cake appear more authentically German, in the middle part of the 20th century, bakeries decorated the top of the cake not only with the coconut-pecan mixture, but also with maraschino cherries and shards of chocolate, a la the Black Forest cake. But there’s no hiding it. This cake is a decadent, larger-than-life Texan, through and through. Pairs well with: A Ruby Port — or if you’re feeling extra-Texan — an Amber Ale from Houston-based St. Arnold’s Brewing.

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Lane Cake

Display case view: A three- or four-tiered, bourbon-soaked sponge cake featuring a rich custard filling with raisins, coconut, dried fruit or chopped nuts, and boiled icing (or a fluffy white icing) around the outside.

The sweet story: A cake deeply woven into Alabama’s cultural fabric and national literary history, Lane Cake is an old-fashioned baked good that’s taken on a mythology all its own. Lane cake’s story starts — like the so many Southern confections — at the county fair. Emma Rylander Lane of Clayton, Alabama, won first prize for her dessert, which she called “prize cake” at a nearby county fair in Georgia. (She was confident in its abilities, it appears, and rightfully so.) Friends eventually convinced her to include “prize cake” as an entry in her 1898 self-published cookbook, A Few Good Things to Eat, but give credit where credit is due by christening it with her own name: Lane cake. With its combination of bourbon and raisins (additional ingredient riffs like chopped nuts and coconut came later), Lane cake became a regional staple at church potlucks and family reunions across the region. But it wasn’t until Monroeville, Alabama’s own Harper Lee included a reference to it in her 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, that the recipe reached icon status. In the book, six-year-old narrator Scout Finch eats a slice of the boozy cake baked by a neighbor and — as the classic line goes — muses, “Miss Maudie Atkinson baked a Lane cake so loaded with shinny it made me tight.” Now we all know that “shinny” is slang for liquor, and “tight” is slang for tipsy, but the bourbon in Lane cake isn’t just for the buzzy effect. It was initially used to keep the cake moist so that it would last longer in the event guests popped by a few days after baking. (This also solves the problem posed by that old Southern saying, “If I had known you were coming, I would’ve baked you a cake!”) Plus, the way the layers of the cake absorb the caramelized, rich notes of the bourbon make this a creation to bake a couple of days in advance of an event: It only gets better when it sits overnight. Many recipes allow for some flexibility on the liquid used to moisten the cake — like wine, brandy, or even apple cider — but the cake-making process for Lane cake is an involved one, so you might want to save yourself an extra glass of whatever you’re cooking with as a reward for when the finished product finally goes in the oven. Pairs well with: Bourbon, neat, in honor of Ms. Lee.

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Doberge Cake

Display case view: A dense cake — typically between 6 and 9 layers — made from thin slices of sponge cake cushioned by layers of dessert pudding. The most common (and popular) puddings are chocolate and lemon, with poured fondant glaze icing in the corresponding flavor. “Half-and-half” doberge cakes split down the center, half chocolate and half lemon, are also a local bakery staple.

The sweet story: New Orleanians love to argue about all-things-food — the best po’boy, oyster shucking techniques, the “curse” of eating king cake outside of Carnival season — but if locals were to name the signature cake of the city, a consensus could assuredly be reached the doberge cake is it. Invented by St. Charles Parish-native Beulah Ledner in 1932, the cake is a spin on the Hungarian Dobos torte, a similarly wafer-thin, tightly stacked cake with layers of genoise cake and chocolate buttercream topped with caramel. Like many now-legendary dessert inventors of the 20th century, Ledner wasn’t a professional baker, but at the insistence of friends and family, began baking her lemon pies, miniature kuchens and this unique spin on the Dobos torte for the public under the name Mrs. Charles Ledner’s Superior Home Baking. “I never intended to go into business. Then friends started asking me to make lemon pies for their friends and the next thing I knew, I was in business,” she explained to the Times-Picayune in 1980. The doberge cake — which she gave an appropriately Francophone-sounding name — was an immediate hit, and quickly became a birthday party staple in neighborhoods across the city. But after a series of health issues in 1946, Ledner sold the doberge name and recipe to Joe Gambino’s Bakery under the agreement that she wouldn’t open a bakery to compete against him in New Orleans within the next five years. But the allure of that sponge-meets-pudding combination was too strong, and Ledner returned to doberge-making at a new bakery in Metairie — a loophole in the non-compete! — just a few short years later. So, native New Orleanians: Are you a chocolate, lemon, or half-and-half? Pairs well with: A chocolate doberge person? Try a glass of a semi-sparkling Italian red like Brachetto d’Acqui. Lemon? An oaked chardonnay can cut through some of the lemony zip.

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Red Velvet Cake

Display case view: A multi-tiered, deep red, lightly sweetened chocolate cake coated in cream cheese frosting.

The sweet story: There are few food moments in film lore more infamous than the armadillo cake scene in the 1989’s tearjerker classic, Steel Magnolias. Bride-to-be Shelley (Julia Roberts) is lamenting the fact that the groom’s cake for their wedding has been baked into the shape of an armadillo — grey icing and all. “Worse, the cake part is red velvet cake. Blood red,” she says, exasperated. “People are going to be hacking into this poor animal that looks like it’s bleeding to death!” Reflected on-screen as a Louisiana staple and with an entry in every church cookbook from Beaumont to Raleigh, red velvet cake has created a public persona that’s fully Southern. It’s origin story, however, is not. During the Victorian Era, “velvet” cake referred to a specific category of “fancy” baked cake that incorporated cocoa powder, an ingredient which is naturally very acidic and helped create a light, soft — dare I say velvety? — crumb in comparison to more common, coarser cakes of the era. In the early part of the 20th century, a combination of “velvet cake” and “devil’s food cake” grew in popularity in the United States, ultimately resulting in a ruddy-brown — not exactly red — “velvet” cake that is the prototype for what we eat today. “As it drifted south, the [red velvet] recipe was often executed with buttermilk. In that time period, most cocoa powder was not only natural, it was also raw. (In modern cocoa powder, the beans are roasted.) The combined effect of the acidic buttermilk and the acidic cocoa powder created a density in the texture of the cake, which amplified its velvetiness,” Stella Park, author of BraveTart: Iconic America Desserts, told Splendid Table in 2017. “Simultaneously, the pH of the cake helped some of the [red] color pigments in the raw cocoa powder shine through. That’s why the trick doesn’t really work today. You can’t do it at home unless you get raw cocoa powder, because the type of cocoa you’re picking up at the store is going to be a roasted product, not raw.” With unprocessed cocoa falling out of favor, bakers are constantly experimenting with all sorts of methods that will — hopefully — ensure their red velvet cakes are a rich, fire engine red. Beet juice was a popular choice during World War II (it also helped to moisten the cake) and, of course, food coloring is the most popular choice today. During the 2010s, there was something of a frenzy around red velvet cake as the dessert moved from “cake” to take on a life of its own as a “flavor.” Red velvet pancakes, red velvet ice cream, red velvet cheesecake — even red velvet-scented candles! — are now out there in the wild, ready and waiting for fans of the ruby-hued original. Pairs well with: The kalimotxo: a Basque-country classic cocktail featuring half (cheap) red wine, half Coca-Cola and a squeeze of lemon.

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Baked Alaska

Display case view: A bombe of ice cream atop a piece of sponge cake or pound cake covered in a shell of tufted meringue and baked in the oven until golden.

The sweet story: When Sen. William H. Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska from the Russians in 1867, he not only ushered in the arrival of the United States’ 49th state, but also one of the most scientifically fascinating desserts still wowing diners with its interplay of hot-and-cold: baked Alaska. It also has an origin story complex enough to match its “how does it work?” baking magic. The elements that make up a baked Alaska are nothing new. Marie Antionette loved to eat meringue by the spoonful. Frozen trifles and ice cream bombes were all the range in Victorian Europe. Thomas Jefferson even served warm, pastry-covered ice cream balls at a dinner party in 1802. But it wasn’t until Sir Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumsford) — an American in exile who also invented, among other things, the double-boiler and kitchen range — made a fascinating discovery that baked Alaska could take shape in earnest. Thompson’s kitchen tinkering led to the realization that, because of the air pockets in whipped egg whites, meringue has low thermal conductivity and serves as a great insulator, meaning that if you wrapped ice cream in meringue and baked it, the frozen interior wouldn’t melt in an oven. (Science is delicious sometimes.) This eureka moment led to the creation of baked Alaska’s spiritual — if not direct — predecessor, omelette à la norvégienne, which was first made sometime in the 1830s and served as an edible “scientific” treat at the Paris World’s Far in 1867. The original name is a bit confounding; what is a “Norwegian omelette”? Much like Alaska is to Americans, Norway was considered the ultimate in snowy northern climates for Parisians. It was likely called “omelette” because the ice cream was, quite literally, encased in eggs. The dish — a genoise sponge cake covered with ice cream and meringue — was a sensation. It comes as little surprise, then, that when ex-pat Parisian Charles Ranhofer — chef at the Delmonico in New York City — wanted to create a dish to commemorate Alaska’s purchase, he took a page from the omelette à la norvégienne’s playbook. Ranhofer’s original version of the dessert he called “Alaska, Florida” (for obvious reasons) consisted of banana ice cream, walnut spice cake, and meringue, baked in the oven. Of course, not everyone was a fan. “The transition from the hot outside envelope to the frozen inside is painfully sudden, and not likely to be attended with beneficial effect,” 19th-century British journalist George Sala wrote. But it’s worked for Antoine’s! Since the late 1800s, baked Alaska has served as the signature, showstopping dessert at this New Orleans old line restaurant, where steady-handed bakers still write celebratory messages on the torched meringue exterior before delivering the sweet dish to the table. Pairs well with: A dry Argentinian Malbec to balance the layers of fire-meets-ice sweetness.

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Hummingbird Cake

Display case view: A dense, layered spice cake featuring a mixture of mashed bananas and canned pineapple covered in cream cheese frosting and, optionally, decorated with toasted pecans.

The sweet story: Hummingbirds might be zippy little delicate creatures flitting from one flower to the next, but hummingbird cake is a thick dessert so chocked full of tropically-inspired ingredients that it definitely lacks any of the buoyancy of its namesake — even if it does share an island connection. The cake’s rise to fame in the United States is also directly linked to Southern Living, where it remains the magazine’s most requested recipe of all time. The story goes that a reader — Mrs. L.H. Wiggins of Greensboro, North Carolina — submitted the recipe, which was published to great fanfare in February 1978. There are records of it appearing before then in small-town papers and county fair bakeoffs, though, so where did the idea originally come from? A sweetly ingenious ad campaign. Hummingbird cake “began as the Dr. Bird Cake [and was] created to bring exposure to Jamaica Airlines and Jamaica as a travel destination in 1969,” writes Anne Bryn in her 2016 book, American Cake. “The airline’s symbol, emblazoned on the jets, was the hummingbird, or as it was known in Jamaica, Dr. Bird. Press parties were held in New York and Miami to unveil a new promotional cake...[with] tropical flavors to conjure up some idyllic beach holiday in the islands. Who would have thought that a marketing promotion by Jamaica Airlines would evolve into one of America’s best-loved cakes?” The cake’s popularity also points to a larger trend in midcentury baking: canned fruit. Canning technologies advanced rapidly after World War II, meaning that fruits that were rare and difficult-to-find for the average consumer before — like, say, a fresh pineapple — were now stocked on grocery shelves, making them prime ingredients for featuring in celebration cakes. But there’s nothing dated about the hummingbird cake, with a banana-pineapple-cream cheese trifecta that ensured the recipe was not only a hit 50 years ago but remains a frequent flyer on potluck tables and cake stands across the Southeast. It’s even earned the impressive nickname “the cake that doesn’t last.” Pairs well with: A fizzy coup of sparkling Cava to add a little bubbly lift — hummingbird-style.

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Pound Cake

Display case view: A golden — often loaf-shaped — butter cake with a particularly dense crumb.

The sweet story: Pound cake — that velvety, dense baked good often cut in slices so thick they could be used as coasters — has an alarmingly simple recipe at its core. A pound of flour, pound of butter, pound of sugar, a pound of eggs. Simple enough, right? It’s a no-frills, kitchen-staple-ingredient dessert with a luminous golden hue (thanks to all that butter and yolk) that doesn’t need any gussied-up additions — unless, of course, bakers want to gild the lily a little bit. Typically cooked in a loaf, tube or Bundt pan, pound cake dates back to the early 1700s, and was first recorded in Amelia Simmons 1795 book, American Cookery. “One pound sugar, one pound butter, one pound flour, one pound or ten eggs,” Simmons writes. “Rose water, spices to your taste; watch it well, it will bake in a slow oven in 15 minutes.” Our measurements and bake times are a little bit larger and longer today — after all, you can’t bake a modern cake in 15 minutes — but the straightforwardness of pound cake is what makes it a dish inexperienced bakers often turn to in the early days of dessert creation. Variations on pound cake exist across the world. In Mexico, there’s panqué con nueces (pound cake with nuts) and panqué con pasas (pound cake with raisins). In French-speaking Caribbean countries, pound cake is a Christmastime delight, often spiked with rum or a mashed banana for extra moisture. In the Brittany region of France, pound cake is known as quatre-quarts (four quarters, for the ratio of the four primary ingredients) and is set apart by using a special, local sea salt butter known as beurre sale rather than regular unsalted butter. You can speckle dried fruits or chocolate chips into pound cake, frost it completely if you’re feeling over-the-top, add in orange zest for an unexpected burst of citrus, or substitute some of the butter for sour cream to create a sour cream pound cake. It’s a perfect canvas for a drizzle of homemade strawberry sauce or a dollop of whipped cream, and I’ve been known to grill slices of pound cake alongside peaches in the summertime then top it off with lavender ice cream. Truly, what can’t pound cake do? Pairs well with: A bee’s knees cocktail — gin, lemon juice, honey.

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Bundt Cake

Display case view: A circular, fluted cake with a distinctive hole in the middle.

The sweet story: While Bundt cake pans are par for the course in kitchens today, few inquiring minds stop to ask why this pan in particular has enjoyed such ubiquity in American kitchen cabinets. After all, why not the madeleine pan? Or even, say, the tins specially-made for that sticky-sweet dessert rum baba? It all ties back to World War II. The actual Bundt cake itself traditionally baked in a Bundt pan was a celebration cake across Germany, Austria, and Hungry known as bundkuchen, a name which combined the words “bund” (a gathering of people) and “kuchen” (cake) to form a “cake for gathering.” Also known as kugelhopf, these yeasty, brioche-like baked goods are dotted with raisins and almonds and eat similarly to a coffee cake. After returning from World War II, Minnesota-native and midcentury kitchen tinkerer extraordinaire Henry David Dalquist, founder of the kitchen supplies company Nordic Ware, began making Bundt pans out of cast aluminum after a request from the Hadassah Society, an organization of Jewish women who wanted to recreate the cakes they remembered from childhood. The “t” added onto the end of “bund” was, by report, for trademarking purposes. Bundt pans now come in a wide array of sizes and patterns, but all have the distinct doughnut shape. The pan sold rather poorly until 1966, and Dalquist was for a time better known as the inventor who patented the automated rotating food tray inside microwaves. But all changed when a Bundt cake called the “Tunnel of Fudge” won second prize at the annual Pillsbury Bakeoff, a competition closely watched and celebrated by homemakers across the country. More than 200,000 requests for the pan funneled into the Nordic Ware company, and the Bundt soon easily surpassed the top-tier tin of the day, the Jell-O mold, as the most sought-after pan in the United States. This cake tin is so pivotal to American culture that several of the original Bundt pans produced by Dalquist are even displayed in the Smithsonian! Today, the Bundt cake is one of a handful of confections that derives its name not from its ingredients or recipe, but rather its shape. You can make angel food cake in a Bundt pan, bake a traditional chocolate cake in 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. Pairs well with: Bundt cake deserves a piping hot cup of coffee at its side.

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Coconut Cake

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).

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 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 what spin on grandma’s classic recipe a person takes. Pairs well with: A Tom Collins — gin, lemon juice, sugar, sparkling water.

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Wedding Cake Flavor

Display case view: Multi-tiered almond-flavored white cake, traditionally with pineapple filling and buttercream frosting.

The sweet story: It’s a sob story told time and time again by New Orleanians who are getting married elsewhere. They arrive at a bakery, ready to place the traditional order for their upcoming nuptials, and confidently request a wedding cake-flavored cake. Record scratch! The staff looks at them quizzically: Uh, what is that? “Wedding cake” flavor is a distinctly New Orleans specialty: an almond-flavored white cake that’s as much a part of the city’s wedding tradition as cake pulls. Everyone born and raised in the city knows what it tastes like, and for centuries, it was the default option for the bulk of wedding cakes — no need for taste-testing multiple combinations of flavors and frostings. Nope, you’re getting a cake with that perfectly sweet, almond-undertoned wedding cake flavor on your big day. The origins of this tradition are a little murky, but probably stem from the confluence of several simultaneous events. Wedding cakes became a commonplace occurrence by the late 1800s, and as evidence by this syndicated column from 1893 — which just so happened to run in the New Orleans Item — almond paste was a big part of the wedding cake experience: In the wedding cake of more ancient type, there was a thicker layer of white sugar which nobody cared about; a medium layer of almond paste, which everybody wished for, and did not always get; and an immense quantity of cake of which many only ate a few crumbs. The latest specimen has a thin layer of sugar, only just enough to look pretty, and underneath are alternate layers of cake and almond paste, one as thick as the other. The consequence is that no one is defrauded of their lawful share of almond paste, or “love” as it is usually called. And while almond-meets-cake flavor fell out of favor elsewhere, this was also around the time with 229,000 Italian immigrants — many Sicilian — were making their way to New Orleans, and Italian culture has long been smitten with using almond flavoring in desserts. Maybe, just maybe, that’s the reason wedding cake flavor has stuck around for a couple of centuries in the Crescent City. Pairs well with: A flute of a top-shelf Champagne to treat yourself, even if it’s not your wedding day.

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Carrot Cake

Display case view: A cream cheese-slathered cake featuring a warmly cinnamon-spiced batter with shredded carrots woven in alongside walnuts, pecans, or (optional and controversial) raisins.

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 when done mix it with the carrots; add a pinch of minced orange-flowers praline, three-quarters of a pound of powder-sugar … and four whole eggs.” It was then poured into a mold and baked, giving us something that very much resembles today’s carrot cakes. In modern kitchens, carrot cakes take many forms: sometimes marketed as a “healthy” alternative to regular white cake; sometimes filled with all sorts of culinary trinkets like pecans and dried fruits; most of the time shellacked in a thick layer of cream cheese frosting. However you like it, it’s safe to say we’ve come a long way from carrot pudding. Pairs well with: A floral, fruity IPA or German Riesling.