lsanderson: (Default)
[personal profile] lsanderson
Fruitcake 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
(will be screened)
(will be screened if not on Access List)
(will be screened if not on Access List)
If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

Profile

lsanderson: (Default)
lsanderson

June 2025

S M T W T F S
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 14th, 2025 10:32 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios