Fruitcake Takes a Caribbean Holiday
Dec. 19th, 2007 07:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lsandersonFruitcake Takes a Caribbean Holiday
By JULIA MOSKIN
WHEN a man in a hairnet beckons, who can resist?
“Come in back — we can’t talk here,” said Steve Cabral, a baker at Taste the Tropics in Brooklyn, rolling his eyes at two customers innocently eating currant rolls. “All these ladies will want to say their thing.”
I had wandered into the Flatbush bakery in search of black cake, a spicy, fragrant fruitcake steeped in dark rum and tradition that is a Christmas classic throughout the English-speaking Caribbean.
Rivalries among the islands are not always friendly, especially when it comes to cricket and music, but the question of who makes the best black cake is resolved in time-honored fashion.
“One from Grenada, she say one way, one from St. Lucia, she say another way,” Mr. Cabral said in the cadences of his native St. Vincent. “Let me tell you how my mother do it — the culture culture culture way.”
In New York at Christmastime, black cake is everywhere, but don’t look for it at Dean & DeLuca or Payard Pâtisserie. The Jamaican Dutchy food truck on West 51st Street, which normally traffics in jerk chicken for Midtown office workers, is taking orders for it; the clerk at the store where I bought Passover wine and dark rum immediately guessed what I was baking and advised the addition of cranberries; an off-duty Metropolitan Transportation Authority employee overheard me discussing the fine points on the subway, and chimed in with his mother’s advice on cooking the fruit to tenderize it.
Although black cake is descended from the British plum pudding, for Caribbean-born New Yorkers and their children, who number more than half a million, it evokes nostalgia for the islands, where the baking was a solemnly observed annual ritual. More
Recipe: Black Cake
By JULIA MOSKIN
WHEN a man in a hairnet beckons, who can resist?
“Come in back — we can’t talk here,” said Steve Cabral, a baker at Taste the Tropics in Brooklyn, rolling his eyes at two customers innocently eating currant rolls. “All these ladies will want to say their thing.”
I had wandered into the Flatbush bakery in search of black cake, a spicy, fragrant fruitcake steeped in dark rum and tradition that is a Christmas classic throughout the English-speaking Caribbean.
Rivalries among the islands are not always friendly, especially when it comes to cricket and music, but the question of who makes the best black cake is resolved in time-honored fashion.
“One from Grenada, she say one way, one from St. Lucia, she say another way,” Mr. Cabral said in the cadences of his native St. Vincent. “Let me tell you how my mother do it — the culture culture culture way.”
In New York at Christmastime, black cake is everywhere, but don’t look for it at Dean & DeLuca or Payard Pâtisserie. The Jamaican Dutchy food truck on West 51st Street, which normally traffics in jerk chicken for Midtown office workers, is taking orders for it; the clerk at the store where I bought Passover wine and dark rum immediately guessed what I was baking and advised the addition of cranberries; an off-duty Metropolitan Transportation Authority employee overheard me discussing the fine points on the subway, and chimed in with his mother’s advice on cooking the fruit to tenderize it.
Although black cake is descended from the British plum pudding, for Caribbean-born New Yorkers and their children, who number more than half a million, it evokes nostalgia for the islands, where the baking was a solemnly observed annual ritual. More
Recipe: Black Cake
