Kitchen Disasters and the Cornmeal Whisky Cake

This was one of those days in the kitchen.  Everybody has them, and I’ve gone through my share. Matter of fact, I’ve gone through enough of them that I started classifying them, half to keep myself laughing at the phenomenon rather than letting it get me down, and half in a spirit of scientific inquiry.  Based upon this research, I have come to the conclusion that there are types of bad days in the kitchen:

1. The Day You Don’t Want to Cook.  This kind of day is characterized by extreme lassitude in the cook.  Good dishes for this sort of day are peanut butter sandwiches, peanut butter tortillas (the same thing, served on a heated, rolled-up flour tortilla), and weenie tortillas (a hot dog, rolled up in a slice of American cheese, rolled up in a flour tortilla and heated in the toaster oven until the cheese melts).  These attacks are generally of short duration and not too serious.
   
   
2. The “Oy, Such a Klutz!” Day.  On Klutz days, things happen in the kitchen:  knives slip and slice open your hand, dishes and glasses take suicide leaps off counters onto the floor where they smash into a million tiny sharp pieces, hot fat pops out of the pan, lands on the burner and sets the stove afire, followed by volumes of smoke and anxious inquiries from other parts of the house.  Do not try to make anything more complicated than buttered toast on a Klutz day.  If you can, don’t even make buttered toast.  You’ll probably get a slice caught and short out the toaster trying to get it loose.  Go back to bed.  Order out for pizza.  Hope things will be better tomorrow.
   
   
3. The Day You Just Flat Did Something Wrong.  This is the sort of day that makes for a great story a long time later, when you can laugh at it. The best story that didn’t happen to me was told by Art Linkletter, and may be apocryphal, about a high school freshman home ec student who was making her first batch of biscuits.  Being a freshman home ec student, and not knowing enough about cooking to realize that what she read didn’t make sense, she swapped the proportions of a couple of ingredients.  Instead of adding two cups of flour and two teaspoons of baking soda, she added two teaspoons of flour and two cups of baking soda.  By the time anybody realized what had happened, the biscuits were in the oven.  It took a long time for anyone to get brave enough to open that oven, and when they did, they discovered a new tactical weapon:  biscuits that went off like hand grenades.
   
   

My personal story in the last category happened when I was (yes) a high school freshman.  No, I wasn’t in home ec.  I was a member of the library club, and the time for the annual bake sale had come around.  I had recently taken my first unsure steps in cooking, and decided that I would make something for the bake sale all by myself.  I’d recently discovered a recipe in Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book for a bourbon whisky cake, and it looked easy enough for me to get through without problems.  So I started in, and by mid-morning had my cake ready and iced, and took it down to the bake sale table on the town square.

When mother got home for lunch, I told her how I’d done this all by myself, and showed her just what I did, and I was just so proud that I was swole up like a balloon.  About that time she asked “You used what?” and so I showed her again, and she said—I remember her exact words—“You dumb cluck, you used the cornmeal instead of the flour!”  I sure had.  I’d gotten the jar that held the white cornmeal instead of the flour jar, and didn’t yet know how to tell the difference between the two.

Well, that (to coin a phrase) took the cake.  I waited anxiously for Monday to hear what had happened, and who had gotten stuck with something that was going to resemble cornbread with frosting on it more than anything like a cake.  When study hall came around, I got hold of Janet Brightman, who had been manning the table during the afternoon, and asked her what happened.  Her story put the absolute finish on the episode.

The cake had escaped notice until midafternoon, when two characters came up to the table who’d been down to Priddy (the closest place to get liquor), and on the way back had been working on the bottle they’d bought.  They had made pretty good progress, were well sloshed, spotted the bake sale, and decided that they oughta get them sump’n to eat.  So they came rolling up to the table and wanted to know what everything was.  When the girls at the table explained what my cake was, that sounded like just what they needed, a cake with whisky in it.  They took the cake, wandered back to their car, sat right there and ate every crumb of it, and were too drunk to know the difference.

When Janet finished her tale, I quietly heaved a sigh of thanks.  And never have I ever mistaken white cornmeal for flour since.

HOOTENHOLLER WHISKY CAKE

Cream the butter with the sugar and add the beaten eggs.  Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt, and nutmeg, and add to the butter mixture.  Add the milk.  Mix the soda into the molasses and add to the batter. Add the raisins, nuts, and whisky.  Mix all ingredients well, pour into a greased and floured nine-inch loaf pan and bake at 300° F. for two hours.

Cornmeal accidents aside, the whiskey cake is pretty good, and makes a nice gift, since it’s a loaf cake and wraps well.  My thanks to Peg Bracken for the recipe, and to those two drunks for eating my worst cooking mistake.

first ran: March 1988

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Text ©1988 by Sam Waring. All rights reserved.
Revised: Wed, 16 Sep 2004 at 13:28:56 UTC