Even with all our evocations and poetry, we human beings are really just big animals.
When I forget this, I try to remember that the way I reacted to something I ate as a child — something that roots me in memory — might just be nothing more than a biological response of a simple being twitching its way toward sustenance.
Recipe: Sweet Potato Layer Cake
But going through life thinking that way all the time? Couldn’t be me.
I get tangled up in my feelings, and in fact, I’ve made a whole career out of it. And those strong emotions are, more often than not, because I took a bite of something that pushed me into a heartfelt, if not utterly overwrought, spiral of joy, grief, transcendence, elation, you name it.
This is exactly the kind of experience I had when I tasted Howard Conyers Jr.’s sweet-potato layer cake.
Conyers is a legacy sweet-potato farmer, barbecue master, distiller and actual rocket scientist (and longtime friend and collaborator). He lives his life diving deep into his curiosities, which is such an exciting thing to experience over food. He said he had “this cake” he thought I would be super into: the old-fashioned carrot cake of his mother, Hallie Conyers, but instead of carrots it was made with grated sweet potatoes.
He was correct. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for a whole year.
It is a small sleight of hand, swapping one orange root for another, but isn’t that how magic usually works? Conyers had an abundance of sweet potatoes, sure, but they also mean a great deal to him and his family. He developed this recipe for his groom’s cake, combining his mother’s famous cake and his father’s farming legacy. It was a beautiful nod to his family, who had built a deep community from the stewardship of land and this particular crop.
It is not the first time I have seen carrot cake become a sort of talisman. My own mother’s carrot cake, very similar to Conyers’s, was one of the first places I felt safe to experiment — namely, by introducing black pepper.
It is a small sleight of hand, swapping one orange root for another, but isn’t that how magic usually works?
In the early 2000s, after studying my family’s cooking heritage, I learned that using black pepper was common practice among Appalachians across the Cumberland Gap and beyond and dated as far back as 300 years. When warm spices, like cinnamon, nutmeg and clove, were scarce, bakers would substitute black pepper. Eventually, when cinnamon became more available for a standard working-class family (or bootleggers, as was the case with my mountain family), my great-aunt Ruby said she kept using black pepper because “there’s nothing wrong with more warmth.” When I adapted Conyers’s recipe, it is the one thing, with his permission, that I added.
Many years later, I met Asha Gomez, a Keralan chef in Atlanta, who makes her own legendary carrot cake, also beautifully based on her own mother’s recipe. Hers is full of black pepper, too, along with cardamom and clove, and upon my first bite, my heart leaped in the same way it did when I tasted the Conyers cake.
These cakes’ stories and histories, full of heart, take me right back to those big feelings. However small a recipe might be in the scope of things, these cakes root down into story and legacy, leaving behind something that speaks to our time here on Earth. The Conyers cake reminds us, with a few grates of a sweet potato, that we are simply beautiful embodiments of all those who came before us and those who surround us.
The post What’s Better Than Carrot Cake? This Sweet Potato Version. appeared first on New York Times.
