My mother quickly became famous for her pound cake. And by famous, I mean everyone in our church liked it. It is a sour cream pound cake. She has the recipe committed to memory and can whip one up at a moment’s notice. In her retirement, she joined one of Atlanta’s oldest chapters of PEO (a philanthropic education organization) and made her pound cake for their auction. Now she does it every year. Her cakes sell for upwards of $50. More recently, she makes two for the auction.
Growing up in South Georgia, at family night suppers at our church, there was only a pile of crumbs left on her cake plate. The cakes were always warm. People thought she did that intentionally. I imagine they had visions of the good minister’s wife lovingly putting the cake together and then letting it bake to perfection while she sat in her dress and heels reading the Bible. But she was a first-grade teacher and by the time she got home from school, got us organized, and made the cake, we were rushing out the door with it hot out of the oven. It was common for her to put it in to bake while she then got herself dressed in church clothes. It was important that she, and we—and the cake—look our best at church, the minister’s family.
Once, when I was in junior high, we were racing around the evening before a special church supper. She was “doing her hair” in her bathroom and asked me to go down to the kitchen, look at the cake, and report to her how it looked. I peered into the window of the avocado-green oven. The pound cake had risen perfectly and was beginning to brown on top, as usual.
I stood at her bathroom door and reported, “It’s black around the edges and the middle is sunken in.”
“What?!” She put down the curling iron and ran, in her slip, to the kitchen. When she saw it was fine, in her mix of relief and exasperation, she whacked me on the head with the oven mitt she had grabbed. “You rascal!”
When I was in college, she periodically mailed a pound cake to me. My dorm mates, and, later, apartment mates, helped me gobble it up. It never lasted very long. My freshman year she also mailed an ironing board to me, so that my clothes would always be pressed. It didn’t fit in my car and I had thought I was off the hook. One day I got a package notice in my mailbox. Full of excitement, I went to the window to claim it. Instead of a pound cake, there was a nearly surfboard-sized cardboard box. I then had to walk all the way across campus carrying it which, by itself, was bad enough but my roommate, who had been with me at the Post Office, was running in front yelling, “Her mother mailed her an IRONING BOARD!” I’m sure I used it once.
For a few years, my dad served the First United Methodist Church in Kingsland, Georgia, on the coast, near the Georgia/Florida line. One of the lazy rivers flowing through the pine-tree-and-palmetto-bush landscape is the Satilla River. The church was at the corner of William Street and Satilla Street. My dad’s business cards had the name of the church and, in true small town form, the address was listed simply as “William and Satilla.” No street number because everyone knew where the church was—on the corner of William and Satilla. His name, Willis, was in the corner with his phone number. He was often out in the community visiting with people, stopping into their homes. A new family had moved in and he stopped at their house. No one was home so he left a card in the screen door, with a handwritten note on the back.
After church each Sunday, my dad, who always said the benediction from the rear of the church, then stood at the door to greet everyone as they exited. This particular day, my mom happened to be standing beside him. The new couple came out, and after chatting briefly with my dad, the woman reached out to my mom and said, “And you must be Satilla.” From then on my friend Gina referred to the pound cake as the Satilla pound cake.
Lately, I’ve been making my mom’s pound cake. My bundt pan is a different shape than hers—she still uses the same one with flat sides and flat bottom. Hers is a two-piece pan, mine is single. In Austin, my life is a completely different shape than hers. I only make the pound cake once a year and have to read the recipe at every step. She gave me the recipe during a phone call. I wrote it down, verbatim—especially the part where she said, “beat the fire out of it,” which turns out to be the key to the texture people have loved about her cake. My adult friends like the cake. At our annual Latkefest party, there is only a pile of crumbs on the cake plate at the end of the night. To date, I have never gotten a piece; it’s gone by the time I can get to it.
I put a lemon glaze on the famous Satilla Pound Cake. Is that defiling it? Is that disrespectful? Or is it a tribute, that I can add my own twist–a cake with a twist, like a martini. The glaze, just lemon juice and powdered sugar, hardens on top and pools around the base of the cake. It adds a zingy flavor. Maybe in Texas, where the peppers are hot, we like a little zing in our desserts too.
In the end, the thing that matters most is what’s under the glaze. The story of the cake is in many ways the story of my life. A different shape, a tartness that is sometimes hardened around the edges, and underneath it is everything my mother taught me about how to survive a life in relationship with other people–how to carry on under the watchful gaze and expectations of people who know very little about who you really are, and, most of all, how to beat the fire out of it to achieve the texture you want.
‘Satilla Pound Cake’ with my lemon glaze
UPDATE: And…here’s the recipe, courtesy of my mom, Paige Moore. (She said she originally got it from the Jesup First Methodist cookbook but she’s tweaked it over the years.)
Ingredients:
3 cups cake flour
3 cups sugar
2 sticks butter (I use butter, my mom uses margarine, the regular kind; she says if you use light margarine the water content is too high)
6 eggs
1/2 pint sour cream
1/4 tsp soda
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp almond
Cream butter, gradually add sugar. Beat it until fluffy (“beat the fire out of it,” per Paige). Then turn mixer speed down, she says, and add eggs one at a time; beat after adding each egg. Add sour cream; mix well. Sift cake flour with soda. SLOWLY put in dry ingredients. Add vanilla. Stir slowly until all flour is in.
Spray pan with Baker’s Joy. Bake at 325 for 1 hour and 10 minutes
Leave a Reply