I was not going to write this post today.
I had a whole different article planned. A roundup of the best spring jams at the Millhaven market (there are so many good ones this year, you have no idea), but then I woke up this morning and the light was doing that thing it does, that golden thing where it comes through the kitchen window at just the right angle and lands on the counter in this one perfect stripe, and I thought: today is a honey cake day.
And then I thought: today is the day I finally tell the truth about the honey cake.
Because I have written about this cake before, in passing, the way you mention a scar without saying where it came from. I have given you the short version, “Nana made it every spring. It means everything. Recipe below.” And every year I post it and every year I feel like a liar, because the short version is not the story. The short version is the lid on the story.
This year I am taking the lid off. I am warning you now: it is long. It is long because it was a whole life, and lives do not summarize, and if you only came for the ingredient list this is the wrong article for you. For everyone else: pour something warm. Sit down.
Let me tell you about my Nana. And let me tell you, for the first time anywhere, about Odile.
Part One: The Girl From the Hollow
Nana Ferrow grew up on the southern end of the Rolling Downs, in the same stone house with the green shutters where she would live her entire life, with the door that never closed right because her father hung it himself and refused on principle to let anyone fix it. You have heard me describe that house before. What I have never told you is that for most of her girlhood, there were two girls in it.
The other one was named Odile Becerra. She came from the hollow on the far shore of Brindle Lake, out on the edge of the Downs, where no one dares venture except the tadpoles and the kelpies. And yes, I said kelpies. Everyone in the Downs will tell you the lake has exactly one, and that seeing it is the privilege of a lifetime, and Odile’s family (and my Nana) let everyone go on believing it. They always maintained, privately, that there are more, and that you see more of them the nicer you are to them (they love honey cake, shells, seaweed, and really any type of plants and flowers that grow in water), which tells you something about how those two were raised, and possibly something about why nobody else ever sees the others.
The Becerras were one of those families the Downs produces every generation or so, too many children and not enough chairs, and Odile met my Nana the way all the best friendships in the Downs begin, which is to say over something stolen.
They were seven. There was a beekeeper on the ridge above Brannock Crossing in those days too, and his name was Dorran (of course). There has always been a beekeeper on that ridge, it is practically a public office, and the office has been held by the Dorran family for as many generations as anyone can count. The name passing down with the smoker and the veils and the standing grudge against the badgers. The Dorran whose honey you can still buy is, by my mother’s reckoning, at least the fourth of that name, and when I asked him once how far back the line goes, he looked at the ridge for a while and said “all the way,” which is the most words I have ever gotten out of a Dorran at one time.
Anyway. The two of them, separately, on the same afternoon, had each decided to steal a piece of comb from that Dorran’s hives. They met in the bracken halfway up, each refused to tell the other what she was doing there, each lied badly, and each instantly knew the other was lying, and according to Nana they sat in the bracken and laughed until they could not breathe and then did the crime together, which went poorly, because everything done with Odile went poorly and gloriously at the same time.
Nana got stung twice. Odile got stung nine times and insisted, all her life, that she had not felt a single one. That was Odile in one sentence, by the way. Nine stings and a straight face.
The beekeeper caught them, of course. He made them work the hives every weekend for a season as payment, which both of them later admitted was the greatest trick any adult ever played on them, because by autumn they loved the work and he could not get rid of them. That is where the honey in this cake comes from.
He taught them things up there that had nothing to do with bees. He taught them that you move slowly around what you want to keep. He taught them that smoke does not calm the hive and that the colony will sting the hand that helps it but you help it anyway. Nana repeated that one to me perhaps four hundred times in my life, usually while I was sulking about some friend or other who had wounded me, and I have used it on my own daughter twice this year already.
And he taught where the wildflowers came in first, in what order, and which slope held the morning sun. Remember that the ridge holds the morning sun. Everything in this story keeps happening on that ridge, and I promise you that nobody planned it that way, it is simply that in the Downs your life happens in about four places.
Part Two: Two Girls, One Cake
The cake was theirs. I need you to understand that before anything else, because for years I told people it was Nana’s recipe, and that is not quite true. It came from a marriage.
They invented it the spring they were eleven, in Nana’s kitchen, because it was the kitchen with the good stove and the mother most likely to tolerate disaster. It began, as I understand it, as an attempt to copy a cake they had eaten exactly once at a harvest fair and could not afford to eat twice. They failed to copy it. What they made instead was better, and they knew it was better, with the total unearned certainty of eleven-year-olds, and they spent the rest of that spring perfecting it like two little alchemists, arguing over every spoonful.
The three eggs were Odile’s law: two is lazy and four is showing off. Nana gave her the butter doctrine in return, that store butter tasted like giving up, and Odile conceded the point but never once in her life churned butter.
I need you to understand their dynamic. Odile did not do patient things. She did brave things and quick things and occasionally catastrophic things, and she let Nana do the patient things, and between them they had one complete person, which is what a best friendship is.
They made the cake every spring after that. Not for occasions. That is important. It was never a birthday cake or a festival cake. It was a cake for the first true day of spring, whenever the two of them privately judged that day to have arrived, and their judgment did not always agree with the calendar or with each other.
And the argument about whether it was or was not honey cake day? That was part of the recipe too.
An Interlude for the Gentleman Who Sends Me an Owl Every Spring
You know who you are. Every year I publish this recipe, and every year, within the day, I receive a letter, by owl, which means he pays for the bird, complaining that he had to scroll past my “life story” to reach the ingredients, and suggesting that I put the recipe at the top.
Sir. I have held my tongue for years and the tongue is now done being held. The recipe without the story is a list of groceries. You can get a list of groceries anywhere. The story is the cake. The story is the reason the cake exists, the reason it has three eggs and not a sensible two or an extravagant four, the reason there is always one slice unaccounted for at the end. When you make this cake from the bare list, it technically works. When you make it knowing what you now know, if you have been reading, it is a different object. Same crumb. Different cake. I do not expect you to believe me, and I do not require it, and I expect your letter in three to five business days.
To everyone else: there is much more story coming. The recipe remains within this article, where it lives, beneath the weight of everything it has to carry. If that arrangement offends you, the Granary lends cookbooks, and I am told they contain no feelings whatsoever.
Now. Where was I. The seasons. I was about to break your heart with the seasons.
Part Three: What the Downs Was Like Then
I have to stop and tell you about the seasons, because you have likely never seen one.
The Downs had winter then. Real winter, the kind that froze you to your hairy toes. Brindle Lake froze to the depth of a forearm. The lanes drifted shut. People banked their fires and visited each other on foot across the white fields because being snowed in alone was considered a moral failure in the southern Downs, and I am not entirely joking. Nana used to say winter was the season the Downs liked best, because it was the season that proved the point of all the others. You stacked wood in autumn and ate preserves in winter and that was the whole philosophy of the place. You took care, in the warm months, of the people you would need in the cold ones.
And then flowers came, and I am told, by everyone old enough to remember, that you cannot imagine it. Not our spring. Not this endless lacquered spring we live in now, where the blossom hangs on the bough like a painting of itself. A real spring, that arrived. That you waited for. The ice went out of Brindle Lake with a sound Nana described as the hills clearing their throat, and the first warm day was a holiday nobody had to declare, and the whole southern Downs walked around grinning at each other like fools because it had happened again, the world had come back to life.
That is the day the cake belonged to. That is what the honey and the butter and the three eggs were for. Not an ode to spring. For spring returning. For the fact that you had to lose it to get it.
Hold onto that.
Part Four: The Years Everything Was Good
I could write ten thousand words on this part alone, which I want noted.
They grew up. Nana stayed, because Nana was the staying kind. She kept the garden that could feed a village and developed the laugh that could wake one up, and she fed people, except now you know where she learned it. She was her own philosophy, walking around in an apron.
Odile burned through the Downs like a comet on a leash. She worked the hives. She worked the harvest. She broke a horse nobody else would go near and two hearts that everybody said she should have gone nearer to. She talked about leaving constantly yet never left, and Nana told me once that she eventually understood that the talking about leaving was how Odile justified staying, that some people have to hold the door open to be able to stand the room.
Every spring, the cake. They made it together in the kitchen with the bad door, and they argued about whether it was the day, and Odile cracked the three eggs, it was her law so it was her labor, and Nana folded the batter because Odile folded batter like she was punishing it. And then they ate the first two slices standing up at the counter, before anyone else in the family was allowed any, a privilege they defended with a unity that the rest of the family found genuinely frightening.
There are people in your life, if you are very lucky, in front of whom you do not have to finish your sentences. That is what they were. The Downs assumed they would be old women together. So did they.
Ingredients
- 240g flour (imported is fine, do what you can)
- 1 and 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
- a pinch of salt
- 2.5ml cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon ground cardamom (Nana did not use this, I added it, she would forgive me)
- 115g butter, softened (real butter, do not test me)
- 250ml Dorran honey (see above, and no, I will not be taking questions)
- 3 eggs (three, exactly three, and now you know whose law that is)
- 5ml vanilla
- 120ml buttermilk
- Zest of one lemon, if the lemons are cooperating
Part Five: The Fires
You know this part. Every family in the Downs has its version of this part, and ours is not the worst one by a long way.
The fires came in the dry year. They came through the southern Downs the way fire does, which is to say indifferently, taking a farm and sparing a farm according to no law anyone could live with afterward. The stone house with the green shutters survived. The hollow on the far shore of Brindle Lake did not.
Odile was away when it burned, which everyone called luck, and which she never once called luck, not one time, not ever. Her family got out, mostly. What I will tell you is what Nana told me, late in her life, in the kitchen, with her hands around a cup she was not drinking from:
She said the fire took the hollow in a night. It was years later when Nana finally told what did the real damage. It was the help that never came. The Downs waited for the capital the way you wait for a neighbor, but the capital was not a neighbor, and by the time anyone with authority stood in the ashes of the hollow making sympathetic noises, Odile had finished changing.
I want to put one small scene here, because Nana put it in every telling, and so it must have mattered more than its size. In the weeks after the fire, the southern Downs did what the southern Downs does. The stone house with the green shutters slept eleven people for a season. Nana’s mother cooked in shifts. The Dorrans brought honey down off the ridge by the pail and would not discuss payment, they simply developed a sudden deafness on the subject that lasted the rest of their lives. Nobody organized any of this. Everyone just arrived to help.
And Odile stood in Nana’s kitchen amid all that goodness, all those neighbors, all that soup, and Nana said she watched her tally it. That was the word she used. Tally. Watched her add up everything the neighbors were doing and weigh it against everything the capital was not, and arrive at a number, and put the number away somewhere for safekeeping. The kindness did not comfort her. That, Nana said, was the first morning she was ever frightened for her, standing in a warm kitchen full of food, surrounded by every reason in the world to believe in people.
Nana said you could see it happen in her face over that winter. Not grief. Grief she knew the shape of, grief sits down at your table and you feed it like everything else. This was grief that would not sit down. This was grief that stood in the doorway with its coat on.
Part Six: The Slow Leaving
Here is the part nobody warns you about when you love somebody: they do not leave all at once. That would be survivable, almost. A door closes, you mourn, the seasons turn you loose eventually. No. People leave the way the tide goes out, so slowly that you keep thinking you are imagining it, and you stand there saying the water is just over there, the water was just here.
Odile stopped working the hives first. Said the ridge made her think of things. Fair enough, said everyone. Then she stopped coming the long way through the village and started coming the back way, when she came at all. Then her talk changed. And I want to be careful here, because this is where I am going to disappoint some of you who want this story to have villains in it with names you can hiss at.
I am not going to tell you who she fell in with. Partly because Nana never told me everything. Partly because what little she did tell me, I have decided not to repeat. You know the shape of it already. You have seen it. Somebody is hurt past bearing, and along comes a room full of people who say: you are right to be this angry, what you lost, you need never lose again, there is a way, we have found it, and the only price is everything soft in you. They never say that last part, but it is always the price.
She started speaking in answers. That was the thing Nana could not get past, the thing she came back to every time she told it. Odile, who had spent thirty years asking the world questions like she was rattling a locked door, suddenly had answers. Certainty had set in her like frost in the ground. And the certainty was not even the worst of it. The worst of it was that she was calmer than she had ever been, and kinder, in a flat, terrible, doorstep way, the way a person is kind to you when they have already decided to leave you behind.
Part Seven: The Spring She Said No
The spring after the fires, Nana made the cake alone for the first time since she was eleven years old.
She did not plan to. She walked the long way round the lake with the basket, flour and butter and the honey and the three eggs wrapped in a cloth, because the hollow families were in the grange housing by then and she thought, this year more than any year, this is what the cake is for. Spring returning. She stood in the doorway of that temporary room with her basket like an absolute fool, she said, smiling, holding eggs.
And Odile looked at the basket and said, not unkindly, and Nana always stressed this, not unkindly, which somehow makes it so much worse: “There’s no point pretending things come back.”
Nana said she stood there and could not find one word, and she had had a word her whole life. The room was very clean and very quiet, and there were other people in it, new friends of Odile’s. And she understood that she had walked in among people who had all decided the same thing Odile had: that a person who never lets herself believe the good things come back can never be gutted the way the fire gutted them. To them, spring returning was not a miracle. It was bait. And the cake in her basket, a whole life’s argument that you have to lose the world to get it back, meant nothing.
She went home and made the cake alone in the kitchen with the bad door, and she cracked the three eggs herself, and she told me, sixty-odd years of springs later, that the sound of the third egg cracking in that empty kitchen was the loneliest sound she ever heard in her life. She left a slice on the windowsill. The windowsill facing the lake. The hollow side. It was still there in the morning. She fed it to the hens and did not cry, she said, until the hens were done, because you do not waste a feeling where hens can see you.
Part Eight: The Years In Between
This part is short and it is the worst part and I am sorry.
Years. That is the part. Years of it.
You think estrangement is an event. It is not, it is a climate. Odile did not vanish. The Downs is not big enough to vanish in. She was around, which is so much crueler. She was a figure at the far end of the market. She was a name people stopped saying in front of Nana, and then, started carefully saying in front of Nana, in that rehearsed casual voice, watching her face. She was rumors, and some of the rumors were probably false, and some of them probably were not.
Whatever she had joined, it grew. Things happened in the region in those years, and I am keeping this vague on purpose and you can be as furious with me as you like, but some of you have grandparents, ask them, they will go vague in the exact same places I am going vague, and you will learn that the vagueness is the answer. Things happened. Doors that had never had locks got locks. And every spring, Nana judged the first true day, and made the cake alone, and left a slice on the windowsill facing the lake, and every morning after, she fed it to the hens. Year over year over year. The most stubborn act of hope I have ever heard of, conducted entirely through baking, witnessed entirely by poultry.
There was one near-meeting in those years that I have permission to tell, because Nana told it freely, it was the only piece of this story she could tell at full voice. The Millhaven market, an autumn, back when there were autumns. Nana at the jam stalls. And down the far end of the row, a figure choosing apples, and you know how it is with a person you have loved that long, you do not recognize them, recognition is too slow a word, your body simply turns toward them before any part of you that uses language has been consulted.
She said they looked at each other down the whole length of the market. Full seconds. Crowds between them. And Nana, and I love her for this and it also breaks my heart, Nana raised her hand. Not a wave exactly. She said it was the gesture you make at an auction when you are not sure you can afford the thing but you bid anyway. Odile looked at her, and looked at the raised hand, and put down the apple, gently, and paid for nothing, and walked out the cattle end of the market.
Nana bought the jam she had been holding. She said she stood there and finished buying the jam, and thanked the stallholder, and complimented the labels, because the stallholder was a young woman who had worked hard on them, and none of what was happening at the cattle end of the market was that girl’s fault. I think about that more than almost anything else in this story. The discipline of that. Her heart was walking out a gate forty feet away and she complimented the labels. They built people out of different material then, and the material was mostly grief used correctly.
Prep time: 15 minutes
Bake time: 35 to 40 minutes
Directions
Pre-heat your oven. If you do not own cast iron, I am not angry, I am just disappointed.
Mix dry. Set it aside.
Whip butter and honey. This will take longer than you think. Keep going.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each. Add the vanilla.
Mix wet and dry. Mix until just combined. Do not overwork it. Nana said overworked batter makes a cake that tastes like it is trying too hard, and she was right about everything.
Fold in the lemon zest. She is watching.
Pour the batter into your prepared pan. Smooth the top.
Bake until the top is golden.
Let it cool and add frosting. Drizzle with a little extra honey if you like. Serve warm.
An Interlude: The Pan
I have to tell you about the pan, because the pan is a character and deserves billing.
The cake is made, was always made, must always be made, in a cast iron pan that is older than anyone in my family can account for. This is not an exaggeration for column purposes. We genuinely do not know where it came from. Nana inherited it from her mother, who claimed to have inherited it from hers, who claimed, and here the record dissolves into folklore, that it had been won from a tinker in a wager whose terms no two relatives ever described the same way. It weighs roughly as much as a healthy toddler. It has one chip on the handle that every generation swears was already there.
Odile named it. Of course she did. She named it The Arbiter, because, she said, everything that went into it came out judged. The name stuck for seventy years and counting. My mother called it The Arbiter. I call it The Arbiter. Posey, age six, calls it The Arbiter with the deep satisfaction of a child who has been handed a word too large for her and intends to use it anyway.
When I am gone it goes to Posey, and the name goes with it, and she will hand a stranger’s name down to her own grandchildren, the name of a woman nobody alive will be able to identify, and that is exactly the sort of immortality Odile would have rolled her eyes at and secretly adored.
Aldworth, my husband, when I told him the whole of this story the first time, said nothing for a long while and then said, “She kept the door open,” and then had to go stand in the garden. He is from the northern Downs. That sentence was, by northern standards, a complete emotional breakdown, and I want it on the record that I married well.
Part Nine: The Ridge
They spoke once more. Properly, I mean. Once. It was on the ridge above Brannock Crossing, up by the hives, which by then had passed to the next Dorran in the line, and you can decide for yourself which of them chose that ground and what choosing it meant, two women in their middle years standing where two girls had once been stung half to death laughing.
I was not there. Nana told me about it exactly twice in her life, once when I was too young to keep it and once, near the end, so that someone would have it. I am not going to reconstruct the whole of it for you, partly because I do not have the whole of it, and partly because some conversations should not be performed, even secondhand, even with love. But she gave me pieces, and the pieces she gave me, she gave me precisely, in the way of a woman who had worn the words smooth from handling.
She said Odile told her, calm as a level field, that everything she had done, and everything she intended to do, was so that no one would ever again stand in ashes waiting for help that was not coming. And Nana believed her. She did not think it was a lie or a madness. She said it was the truest thing Odile ever said, and that it had been carried so far in one direction it had come out the other side of good and kept walking.
She said she tried everything she had. She was not a clever arguer, my Nana, she was a feeder of people, so she did not argue doctrine, she argued memories. Do you remember the ice going out of the lake? Do you remember standing in the lane grinning at strangers because it had happened again? You cannot keep a spring by nailing it down, my girl, a season nailed down is just a death that smells like flowers. She reminded her, on the ridge.
Everyone who lives in this region now, under this sky we have, pay attention to my Nana on that ridge a lifetime ago: a season nailed down is just a death that smells like flowers. She was not a prophet. She was just paying attention earlier than everybody else. And Odile, she said, listened all the way through, politely, and at the end she looked at her, at her oldest friend, her sister in everything but paper, and said: “You’d understand if you’d ever lost anything.”
And my Nana, who told this part with her eyes perfectly dry, every time, said back: “I’m losing the only thing I’d have run into that fire for. It’s standing right here, telling me it doesn’t burn.” And that was the end. One of them, Nana walked back down the ridge alone, and I have to tell you honestly that she never told me which one walked away first, and I have spent my whole adult life trying not to wonder.
An Interlude: The Letters
When we cleared out the stone house, we found the letters.
A bundle in the dresser by the window that faces the lake, tied with garden twine, each one addressed in Nana’s square, certain hand to a person whom she had never forgotten, and not one of them stamped, and not one of them sealed. They were never meant to go anywhere. They were a place to put things. I read three before I understood what I was holding. And then I understood, I put the third one down very carefully, and I did not tell my mother what I had found for three days.
They were not dramatic. They were the news, and this is what undid me. The hens, the weather, who had married whom, a long and frankly libelous account of a dispute over a fence line, what the honey was like that year. Letters to a person across the lake, written across a distance no post could cover, in exactly the voice you use for someone who is the first person you want to tell everything to. Sixty years of last Tuesdays that never happened.
The last one in the bundle was written the spring before she died. It is four lines long. I am not going to print it. I have been asked, by people who know it exists, and the answer is no. I will tell you only that it ends mid-sentence, and not because she was interrupted. They went into the ground with her.
Part Ten: After
Odile left the Downs that year, or the next. Reports differ, and the people who made them are gone. I am the last keeper of even this much of it, which is the entire reason this post is the length it is. So if you have made it this far, congratulations, you are now a keeper too.
There were sightings for years. There were rumors for longer. There was never a letter. There was never a grave that anyone could point to either. Nana noticed that, the way she noticed everything, and said nothing about it, the way she said nothing about everything that mattered most.
What she did instead, you already know, because I have been telling you about it your whole life, every spring, in this column, under cheerful titles.
She made the cake.
Every spring of her long life. After her parents died, the cake. After her husband died, the cake. The spring after her hands began to shake so that my mother had to crack the eggs, the cake. Though God help anyone who folded that batter too hard in her presence. She judged the first true day of spring by her own private arithmetic, and she made the cake, and a slice went on the windowsill facing the lake, and in the morning it went to the hens, and if you asked her why, she would say it was for the birds, and if you were family you knew that was true, and you knew which bird.
And then the Silence came, and the spring arrived and did not leave, and the whole region stood around inside the thing my Nana had warned one woman about on a ridge before any of us were born. The blossom stayed. The light stayed. A death that smells like flowers, going on and on. I am not going to tell you what Nana said the first morning it became clear the season was not turning, because this is a family publication and she was a farm woman with a farm woman’s vocabulary.
But I will tell you what she did, because I was in the kitchen when she did it. She stood at the window facing the lake for a long time. Long enough that my mother and I started exchanging looks behind her back, the way families do when they are deciding whose job it is. And then she said, to the window, not to us, in the most ordinary voice in the world: “Well. Somebody got their wish.”
And she never said one word more on the subject. Not to me, not to my mother, not to anyone, for all the rest of her life. The university sent its surveys around. The papers wrote what the papers wrote. The whole region argued about what the Silence was and where it came from and whose fault and what it meant, and the wisest woman in the southern Downs, the one person I have ever known who had seen the shape of it coming, stood at her window and said four words to the glass and then asked what we wanted for supper.
I have turned those four words over for the rest of my life like a stone in a pocket. I do not know what she meant. I want to be honest with you about that, after everything I have told you, because you have earned my honesty by reading this far. I do not know whose wish, or whether she even meant anything beyond a tired woman’s bitterness at a sky that would not behave. The Downs is full of people who claim their grandmothers predicted the Silence, and I have always found those people tiresome, and I refuse to become one of them in print.
But I will tell you that she went into the kitchen that same day, out of season, took down The Arbiter, with no first true day to judge because there would never be one again, and she made the cake. And from then on she made it whenever she judged the spring needed answering, which was her word, and the slice went on the windowsill all the same.
She is gone now. You all know that, you sent such kind letters. She died in the stone house with the green shutters, in the bed she was born in, with the door that never closed right standing open to the lane, which is exactly how she would have ordered it if death had taken requests.
The hens still got the slice that spring. My mother saw to it. Then it came to me.
Part Eleven: Why I Am Telling You This Now
Because every year I post a cheerful recipe and every year somebody writes to me saying it came out lovely, and that is wonderful, truly, but you were making something you did not understand.
It’s like singing in a language you do not speak, beautifully, to a tune that is actually a lament.
Because my daughter sat on the counter this morning the way I sat on Nana’s, and she asked me, why we make a cake for spring when it is always spring, and I stood there with three eggs in my hands like my Nana in a doorway sixty years deep. It was then I decided that my daughter was going to grow up knowing what the cake is, and that meant all of you were going to find out with her, because I only have the courage to tell this story once, so it is going in the column, at full length.
The cake is not a celebration of spring. It never was, not even at the harvest-fair beginning, even they did not know that yet. The cake is a promise you bake annually to the people you have not given up on. It is the door held open. It is the slice on the windowsill, set out in the full knowledge that it has never once been taken, because the keeping of a promise is not conditional on its being collected.
It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a genuinely excellent cake.
Part Twelve: One Last Thing Before the Recipe
If you have an Odile, and I know most of you do given your letters. You cannot argue them back. My Nana, the wisest woman I ever knew, could not do it on her best day on her own ground with sixty years of love behind her, so you and I are not going to manage it over a holiday table. The grief that will not sit down cannot hear you from the doorway. That is not yours to fix and it was never yours to fix.
But you can keep the kitchen warm. You can crack the third egg in the empty room and let it be the loneliest sound in the world and crack it anyway. You can put the slice on the windowsill. Not because they will come for it. Because the hens are watching, and the children are watching, and the Downs is watching, and the keeping of it is the whole of who we are. Anyway. Anyway, anyway, anyway. I have been crying on and off for eleven sections and Aldworth has wordlessly refilled my tea four times and is currently pretending to oil a hinge, the good man. Here’s to you and your Odile’s.
C. F. Aldworth
Nana Ferrow’s Eternal Spring Honey Cake
Serves: 8, or 4 if nobody is pretending to be polite. Set one slice aside. You know why now.
A word before the list. This cake only works with Dorran honey. I know how that sounds, and I do not care how it sounds. I have heard every argument, I have watched sensible bakers substitute perfectly respectable clover honey from up north, and what comes out of the oven is a perfectly nice cake that is not this cake. The bees on that ridge work the same wildflowers two girls crawled through a lifetime ago, and either you believe that matters or you have not been paying attention for the last twelve sections. Walk up the ridge. Bring coin and patience. Dorran does not chat, but the honey speaks for the whole family.
Lemon Buttermilk Frosting
- 240g icing sugar
- 45ml buttermilk
- Zest and juice of one lemon
- a pinch of salt
Directions
Sift the icing sugar into a bowl.
Add everything else. Whisk until smooth.
It should be thick and loose. Adjust with more buttermilk or sugar as needed.
Spread over the cooled cake. The lemon is not negotiable.
Clementine Ferrow-Aldworth writes about food, family, and the Rolling Downs from her home outside Millhaven. She can be reached by post or by shouting from the road. She will hear you.