MARGARET WALTHOUR LIPPITT’S LANE CAKE This recipe from “The Modern Art Cookbook” comes from Caws’ late grandmother, a painter and avid cook who lived on Nun Street in downtown Wilmington. Caws calls her grand-mother’s version of this classic Southern cake “the best of all the Lane Cake recipes.” www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com Cake ingredients: 1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened at room temperature 2 cups granulated sugar 1 tsp vanilla extract 3 ¼ cups cake flour 3 ½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp salt 1 cup milk 8 egg whites Filling ingredients: 8 egg yolks 1 ¼ cups granulated sugar Grated rind of 1 orange 1 ¼ cups pecans, chopped ½ tsp mace ¼ tsp salt 1 cup shredded coconut 1 cup glacé cherries, quartered 1 cup raisins 1/3 cup bourbon (apple, grape or cherry juice, if preferred) Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Grease and flour three 9-inch round cake pans. Cream butter and sugar together until light and creamy. Beat in vanilla. Sift together flour, bak-ing powder and salt twice. Stir flour mixture into batter alternately with milk. Beat egg whites until stiff but not dry. Stir ¼ whites into batter, fold in remaining whites into bat-ter and spoon into pans. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool and turn onto cake racks. To prepare filling, mix together yolks, sugar and orange rind in a heavy pan or in top of a double boiler. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until sugar dissolves and mixture thickens enough to coat back of spoon. Do not allow to boil. Remove from heat and stir in remaining ingredients. Let filling cool. Fill the cake layers and top and sides of cake. Optional icing method as shown on left: Fill the cake layers and top with filling and ice the sides with a classic Seven Minute Frosting. Mary Ann Caws An academic who writes mostly about French art and literature, Wilmington native Mary Ann Caws might seem like an unlikely cookbook author. In fact, “The Modern Art Cookbook” is Caws’ sec-ond foray into the genre. Her first, “Provençal Cooking: Savoring the Simple Life in France,” was published in 2008. For “The Modern Art Cookbook,” published last year by Reaktion Books, Caws spent about three years researching and translating recipes written by and for the titans of modern art. The book was inspired by Caws’ grandmother, the late Margaret Walthour Lippitt, a Wilmington artist and accomplished home cook whose recipes for Lane Cake and Sherried Crab are included in the book. Other recipes are attrib-uted to Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Georgia O’Keefe. Instead of pho-tos of the finished dishes, images of modern art illus-trate the recipes. Several are also paired with poetry, such as an excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to the Artichoke.” It’s a book that Caws says is meant to be read as well as used for cooking. Caws, a distinguished professor of French, English and comparative literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York, notes she is lazy in the kitchen. She says even a novice cook could tackle the recipes. “Everything in here tastes wonderful. There’s only one thing that flopped,” Caws says. “It really flopped. It’s called Heavenly Hors d’oeuvres — it was given to me by the estate of Helen Frankenthaler and it was terrible.” Caws included the Abstract Expressionist’s recipe anyway, but says when she gives talks about the book she often warns listeners about the dish, which includes caviar, poppy seeds and raw mushrooms. “I think if you cook them it would be slightly better,” she says. Caws resisted altering the modern artists’ recipes to suit today’s tastes. “I haven’t lightened things really, but I have said sometimes how one could do that and I also sometimes doubled the recipe,” Caws says. “I didn’t feel it was up to me to make changes to Cezanne’s cooking. Or Cezanne’s housekeeper’s cooking.” 91 WBM
2014-11
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