Mid-century food has been a running fascination/source of mockery since the early days of the internet. Even before the widespread popularization of organic, homegrown ingredients, people had largely turned away from the technicolor kitchen adventurism found in old recipe cards.
A few weeks ago there was a New York Times article addressing what I have referred to on this site as “mid-century peculiarities” about food and cooking.
“The women of the Women’s Education Association badly wanted the sacrosanct light of science to illuminate women’s work — done in the kitchen — with an emphasis on what was replicable, observable, gradable and expressive of human dominance over and mastery of nature. “ – Betty Crocker’s Absurd, Gorgeous Atomic-Age Creations by Tamar Adler, New York Times
The article generated a moderate amount of buzz. As far as I can tell, the real story lies somewhere between the grandiose claims and the somewhat joyless rebuttals.
Much like those two extremes, we often fall on similar “either/or” dichotomies when it comes to food in culture. “Local, fresh and organic” may fit the general modern notion of purity in food, but not too long ago ‘purity’ meant the exact opposite. The “suffocating sanitizing” actually dates back further than the age of Betty Crocker and it stemmed from a legitimate need to escape spoilage and contamination.
What gets lost in all of this is any kind of nuance or fluidity. Take my great-grandmother for instance; she fished, she farmed… and she made “Vanilla Butternut Cake.”
Tied to the cap of the bottle found in the cabinets of every member of my family is the recipe for this easy and delicious pound cake. While it may not have the panache of shrimp enshrined in green Jell-O or potato salad pressed into loaf form, the central ingredient in the cake is unmistakably from the past.
The origin story on the North Carolina-based Superior Flavors’ website makes little attempts to obscure their products’ lab-grown origins. The explanation is that the line of flavors were simply invented by chemist Jerry Fox in the 1930s for his wife Violet.
A few years ago my aunt took the effort to make sure our supplies were replenished, and for Christmas she gave each family member their own bottle of Superior “Vanilla, Butter & Nut” flavoring along with a copy of the recipe. She reminisced about my great-grandmother making this cake around the holidays, how heavenly it smelled, and she noted that one bottle might well last a lifetime.
In chef Sean Brock’s book “Heritage” he included a recipe for Velveeta fudge, wryly noting that for him, Velveeta was a ‘heritage ingredient.’ As it turns out, “Imitation Vanilla, Butter & Nut Flavoring” is a heritage ingredient for my family.
It was only when I began to write this entry that I came to realize that this cake recipe isn’t as ubiquitous as I’d assumed. The flavoring can’t be found in most grocery stores (although substitutes exist), and the origin of the recipe and even the company were hard to locate.
When I searched old newspapers for the pound cake recipe, Maryland had the most results. Even Superior Flavors’ home-state of North Carolina didn’t offer any clues.
The recipe was making the rounds here in Maryland papers in the 1970s, particularly Western Maryland, near where my Great Grandmother was from.
Two different people won the same cooking contest in different years with this cake, first in 1973 and then in 1977. The contest in question had the oh-so-challenging restriction that the recipes must contain… eggs.
Now that I know that “Vanilla Butternut Cake” isn’t as common as say, green-bean casserole, I will probably bake it more often. It lacks the glorious kitsch of neon aspics, and the spiritual gravitas of hand-preserved garden harvests, but it fits quite nicely into real life.
Recipe:
- 1.5 cups sugar
- .25 cups Crisco
- 1 stick of butter
- pinch of salt
- 2 eggs
- 1.5 cups flour
- .5 cups evaporated milk
- 2 tsp vanilla-butter-nut flavoring
Cream together shortening, butter, sugar and salt. Beat in eggs one at a time. Alternately add in flour & milk, ending with flour. Fold in flavoring by hand. Pour into a greased tube or bundt pan. Place in cold oven, turn oven on to 325°. Bake for one hour & 45 minutes. Don’t peek! Remove from pan immediately.
★ I once made this cake using 1/3 coconut flour & adding extra milk (per coconut flour instructions) and it was excellent!
Great Grandma Cross in the Cacapon River