Baking plum cake at midnight: Remembering my sister
September 2020: We took Carol home to the Atlantic off Davis Park on Fire Island, her “happy place.”
Last September the Chef and I scattered Carol’s ashes in the Atlantic on the Fire Island beach she loved. Yet, the grief over the loss of my sister and partner in life refuses to scatter, stays gathered in a heavy clump in my chest. It’s not just the loss I carry, but the memory of Carol, and I carry it alone. While my brothers grieve the loss of their sister, even they have admitted it is nothing like what I feel. And her friends, who were so present when she was dying, have disappeared. Sometimes my sister-in-law, Susan, will text me something that reminds her of Carol or my sister’s sweet “Writing Sisters” will send me a picture of her that pops up in their Facebook “memory” feed or just write me they are thinking about her. These remembrances cheer me more than the senders realize. So I ask your forbearance and urge you to read all the way through this long post, which is chock full of Carol’s own writing. It’s my way of doling out my memories of Carol, revealing her essence, so that others may carry her, too. Even those who had never known her (not to mention getting a few things straight about baking a plum cake).
Carol met the women she came to call her “Writing Sisters” serendipitously in 1992 at an Omega writing workshop. They clicked so well that after they dispersed to places far afield as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and Brooklyn, NY, they coordinated prompts and sent the resultant writings and news of their lives to each other, via snail mail, at first and then email; they even gathered together once a year for twenty-five years. Carol wrote “Baking plum cake at midnight” in September 1992 in three minutes to their first prompt, “preparing a meal.”
Buried in that one perfect paragraph is the sentence. “Tomorrow I am leaving to visit my father at the hospice.” Our father would die of lung cancer soon after her visit. How like Carol to seek out comfort in cooking and be lulled to sleep by the scent of a cake baking in the oven. She was particularly attuned to scent. I know. When I had the sad task of clearing her apartment, I found literally dozens of bottles of perfume, some quite pricy, of which I kept several, because we shared a similar “nose.” Here’s my favorite of her Writing Sister works:
Why did Carol give me a recipe for a “clafoutis”?
The recipe Carol had been searching for, to no avail, that insomniac night of the plum Cockaigne, was Marian Burros’ famous recipe for The Plum Torte. By now probably all know the story of how the New York Times printed it early every September from 1983 to 1989 and then provoked an outcry among readers when it stopped printing the recipe. While they started printing it again in 1991, Carol would have been looking for her original clipped recipe. The one she read me over the phone while I wrote out her instructions on a small slip of paper (see below). and it has been my fruit dessert go-to for parties ever since.
But why did Carol tell me it was a clafoutis, a similarly simple recipe that makes use of summer fruits but contains milk and is more eggy? And gripped by an urge for ornamentation, each time I made the “clafoutis,” whether with plums in summer or apples in winter I styled the fruit wedges in an elegant swirl like so (below). Everyone commented on how professional and beautiful it looked, but never how dry and thin the cake turned out.
Sadly, I cannot ask my sister why she misspoke, just as I cannot ask her to soothe my anxieties at 12:00 AM ( I am not a midnight baker) or what she was trying to say when she mouthed words in one brief window of lucidity after her brain bleed, four days after life support was removed. But as I take out the Kitchenaid stand mixer (pictured above) that was handed down to her from our mother, and I start creaming the sugar and butter for the plum torte, that smell Carol tried to describe in the short essay, “Magic Smells,” wafts up: a smell of 1950s California kitchen, Betty Crocker cake mix, comfort and care. I think of the worlds we created in our childhood and our late mother when she was young and glamorous and partook in our giddiness. I also think of my maternal grandmother, Rosie. Too bad that I was a finicky child and never once ate the deep dish peach pie Rosie baked when she visited us in Los Angeles and later when we moved to Virginia. Carol was inspired by Rosie’s baking, and wrote this incisive portrait of our imperious grandmother in 1993, again for the Writing Sisters:
“No one would tell me how dry and thin the cake was.”
No one, that is, except the Chef. I had brought my plum clafoutis to a dinner party at our friend Marit’s. It just so happened, it being plum season, that Marit had baked a plum cake, too. But hers looked so much puffier than mine and had a crusty top. Hers tasted better too, more moist with the purple plums interleaved throughout and not just on the top layer, as in mine. I must have looked crestfallen, because she shrugged and said, “It’s just plums, flour, butter sugar and eggs.” And that was exactly what was in mine. I had been unwittingly using the Marian Burros plum torte recipe all these years but getting two things wrong: you plunge the plum wedges directly into the batter. You use a springform pan. Crucial!
Fortunately, our well-equipped “Cozy Cabin” in Woodstock, that I write about here had several springform pans. I baked two baskets of Story Farms red plums into two plum tortes, giving half to my brother Martin’s family who was staying in nearby Saugerties (Marty makes a mean plum cake himself, see above!). It was perfect. I wish Carol could have seen it and had a slice. I wish she could have been with me floating on my back in a Catskills beaver pond enjoying a “moment of perfect happiness,” those moments that she excelled in capturing. I’m not a natural baker, like Carol. There is more fruit staring at me reproachfully each week than I like to think. But I will try to think instead that Carol is urging me to fold the juicy plums or crisp apple into the batter, to put it in the oven and inhale.
“Moment of perfect happiness,” in a beaver pond off the Wyndham Path, summer 2021