My 40th Year on Earth: The Queen of Sheba

Whenever I make a loaf of banana bread or a batch of sugar cookies from my grandmother's recipe, I always think about the convenience of modern baking equipment. The first stand mixers were sold mostly to professional bakers starting in 1914. Home versions came a few years later, but were expensive, around $200(which would be around $3K today, calculating for inflation). Later models were smaller, more efficient, and more affordable. The more more affordable versions were still expensive, so electric hand mixers were often a more cost friendly choice, but man would it suck to use a hand mixer for certain types of recipes. One of the most famous stand mixers, Julia Child's blue KitchenAid, is on display at the Smithsonian's American History Museum. It's part of a permanent display of her kitchen. If you haven't seen it in person, I highly recommend a visit.

I love my stand mixer, Stanny. My parents gave him to me as a 30th birthday present after my previous stand mixer (my mom's 25+ year old one) decided it had mixed enough things in its life. Stanny makes marshmallows possible. He's moved cross country with me, living in his own box because he's so heavy. The convenience of Stanny cannot be understated. 

However, Stanny doesn't always have a place in a recipe, and that includes the subject of today's entry into my 40th year on Earth. When I made my original list of things I would do during this momentous year, I planned to make a four-course meal featuring recipes from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, Louisette Bertholle, and Simone Beck. April has been surprisingly busy, so I had to re-plan a bit, and settled on making one recipe instead...the Reine de Saba, or Queen of Sheba, cake.

Let's be 100% honest: this is really the only recipe I want to make in this cookbook. I bough my copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking not long after reading My Life in France, a wonderful book written by Julia Child and her great nephew, Alex Prud'homme, focusing on Julia and Paul's arrival in France and her immersion into the world of French cooking. I love this book and I love Julia Child. She wanted to make French cooking, veiled in so much history and snobbery, accessible to home cooks. Both volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking contain more than recipes; Julia and her co-authors are teaching the reader how to cook. Techniques are broken down, equipment is explained, and ingredients are discussed at length. One recipe leads you to at least three other sections of the cookbook. Julia has a technique for everything. It's best if you follow her suggestions; she knows things.

Quick aside: My Life in France is also featured in the movie version of Julie & Julia; it's the basis of the Julia Child portions. If you haven't watched the movie or read Julie Powell's memoir, I give you permission to skip both. Or to only watch the Julia Child parts of the movie; they're the best parts. Originally, I was going to focus more on this, but why bother writing about my negative reaction to both? If you ask me nicely, I'll share my full opinion with you, preferably while drinking a really good glass of wine at 1 pm on a Tuesday. It'll be oh so very French.

Back to the Queen of Sheba cake. It's one of the last recipes in MTAOFC and is a surprisingly short cake recipe. There are ten ingredients in the cake, and five references to other sections of the cookbook for instructions on a particular technique. These include:

• How to butter and flour a cake pan
• How to cream butter and sugar
• How to beat egg whites
• How to scoop and level flour for measuring
• How to pulverize almonds (new one for me)

I read all five of these helpful tutorials. I've been baking since my pre-teens, and have, miraculously, been doing four of the five of these correctly the whole time. Pulverizing almonds was new for me; add sugar before pulsing in a food processor so the oil from the almonds doesn't become lumpy. Who knew? 

The Reine de Saba cake was supposedly the first French cake Julia Child enjoyed upon her arrival in France. I have no idea if this is true, but what an experience it must have been! This isn't the chocolate cake we're all so used to. It's meant to be slightly underdone, making it creamier in the center. It's not the type of cake that requires filling. It's often left naked, without frosting or glaze, or with a simple dusting of powered sugar. Frosted versions are decorated with almonds. It was named for the Queen of Sheba, a ruler from the 11th century BCE (probably), who ruled what is today Ethiopia and Yemen. She was a visitor to King Solomon's court, and may have had a son with him. To paraphrase something I read about her, her parts of the Bible are pretty boring so they probably actually happened. She also appears in Islamic stories and figures prominently in the folklore of Ethiopia. If you're an American Gods fan, Bilquis is another incarnation of the Queen of Sheba. This concludes your history lesson for today.

The French often named confections after famous or infamous figures from history. The Queen of Sheba cake falls into this category. It's a rich chocolate cake with almonds in the batter and as decoration. It's almost flourless, and based on the tastes I had as I was baking it, super decadent. It seems fitting to name it after a queen who "sped" to Solomon's court in three years time (it was a seven year trip), bringing gold and riches with her. 

What's most interesting about making this cake isn't the history, but getting used to the way the recipe is written. I guess I've become accustom to the way recipes appear online or in modern cookbooks; everything is detailed in one place. I always read a recipe multiple times before baking, and this was no exception. I also read my five how-tos several times, just to make sure I was doing everything to Julia's specifications. I browsed through a few versions of the recipe online too, mostly for tips since that's really what internet recipes are for. This was a poor decision. You see, I got so comfortable with how I do things, that I neglected one of the most important things about making a recipe from MTAOFC:

Julia Child knows things. And she is always right when it comes to technique.

Julie Powell discovered this during her year spent cooking and baking her way through MTAOFC. You have to do things the way Julia tells you. This includes, but is not limited to, drying the pieces of beef for beef bourguignon, the temperature of eggs, the way in which you whisk anything, and how to kill a lobster. Even when she makes a mistake, Julia makes it a learning moment. As I was making the cake last night, I followed the instructions from one of the online versions of the recipes for melting the chocolate. I wasn't sure my pans would work the way Julia wanted them to work. I don't temper chocolate ever, so I don't have a double boiler or metal or glass bowls for melting over simmering water. Julia's method is just a small saucepan resting in a larger saucepan. I should have listened to Julia. I melted the chocolate as I do for similar recipes and it was an absolute failure. It didn't melt, but clumped. This would not do.

So I threw it out and started again, following Julia's instructions. Of course, it worked perfectly the second time. MTAOFC was a multi-year writing project because Julia, Simone, and Louise tested every recipe and technique multiple times. They didn't put anything in the book that didn't work. I should know better, but I'm set in my ways and know things too. Just not as many things. And apparently not how to properly melt baking chocolate.

Once I got the chocolate situation under control, the recipe was a breeze. There's very little flour, only 1/2 cup of cake flour, and minimal sugar. The pulverized almonds take the place of more flour and give the cake a nice flavor. It bakes in 25 minutes (20 minutes in my oven), so a quick bake. I let the cake sit over night before adding the icing. The icing is even easier: just chocolate, coffee, and butter. I used the pan within a pan method for melting the chocolate then hand mixed butter to give it a creamy consistency. The last step was moving the pan into an ice bath, stirring until the icing got to the right consistency for spreading. I've never done this before, and it's an amazing technique. It takes almost no time and is easy to control from a mixing standpoint. Icing and frosting can quickly go south if you beat it too much. This method makes that less of a concern. It was easy to work with once it was ready and I finished the cake with almond decorations.

A few of my friends came over today for wine and crafts, and we enjoyed the cake. It's definitely denser than most chocolate cakes I've made. It's like a cross between a torte and a brownie, creamier in the center, but not hard to eat. It's not overly sweet, but not bitter because of the semi-sweet chocolate. The coffee and almonds make a difference; you can definitely taste both.

I will definitely make this cake again, but follow Julia's directions from start to finish. There's no reason to not follow her recipe. She knows how to make an elevated, fancy recipe approachable. Julia Child knows things. Trust Julia Child.

The UT Recipes: Shhh! It's a secret.

"Instead of studying Locke, for instance, or writing - I go make apple pie or study The Joy of Cooking, reading it like a rare novel."

-Sylvia Plath

Baking has always been a form of therapy for me. The preciseness is appealing; measuring ingredients, mixing them just so, following specific instructions for baking, setting a timer. The organizer in me likes the steps and the order especially given how chaotic and uncontrollable most of life can be. When I bake, particularly old favorites like banana bread, chocolate chip cookies, or yellow cake, I don't have to make decisions or argue with anyone about a minor detail that will end up being forgotten ten minutes after our conversation ends. It's just me, Stanny (yes, I named my stand mixer), and whatever recipe I've settled on for the day. The benefit for everyone else is delicious treats and my decreased stress level.

I have friends who also find baking soothing when stressed; Jessica has written about it over at Neek Confessional and I have a conversation about this with at least three people at work every time I bring in baked goods. Some people find the same feeling with cooking but I never have unless I'm following a recipe. I'm not the type of person that just throws things together and makes a fabulous dinner. I suspect this is why I'll never be a chef but I can see myself being a baker one day.

As I started work on this month's UT Book recipe, I began researching the recipe (one I was not at all familiar with) and stumbled upon an interesting nugget related to it: the cake I've selected was a favorite recipe of Sylvia Plath. She made the cake frequently and supposedly baked one up the day she wrote the poem "Death & Co."; Plath baked when she wrote. According to author Kate Moses, Plath found baking and cookbooks a connection to "the life of the body" and kept a baking journal to log her daily baking (this is a wonderful idea). She adored The Joy of Cooking and subscribed to Ladies' Home Journal to keep up to date on the latest recipes. She wrote of her kitchens in an essay called "Kitchen of the Fig Tree" for the Christian Science Monitor, one of the first essays she had published. And before you ask, yes, I see the irony in her baking and her suicide via carbon monoxide poisoning (from the oven in her kitchen). I choose to look beyond this and simply focus on the joy baking brought her in life rather than the macabre. Moses, in her research for her novel Wintering, found the same sort of solace in baking as she worked through her fictional account of the last days of Plath's life. I understand Moses completely and feel a kinship to her baking need as she finished the final chapters of her book.

So what was this cake Plath so loved? Depends on who you ask; the cake has several names including Secret Ingredient Cake and Mystery Cake. However, it's real name and the name it shall forever have in my heart is Tomato Soup Cake.

Tomato Soup Cake has a history in the 1920s and 1930s when ingredients like eggs and dairy would have been scarce. One blog I read about the cake called it "a recipe of frugality"; it could be made with things you would naturally have at home including canned soup (made popular by Campbell's in 1897). The soup adds moisture to the cake without extra expense. Original versions of the cake didn't include frosting which makes sense given the popularity during the Great Depression. The cake was a staple of community cookbooks for decades (although I couldn't find it in either of the Junior League books I have from 1950 and 1964). According to the Campbell's article, community cookbooks were the way recipes were shared before official test kitchens cropped up; their kitchen opened in 1941. Campbell's first version of the recipe was more like a British pudding (more similar to a bread pudding or custard or both). In 1942 they released the first version of the cake more like the one in the UT Book called "Halloween Spice Cake." They would test versions of the cake from 1950-1966 until they conducted "recipe experiment #38" which adapted the recipe to use cake mixes that were popular at the time. This recipe became the first recipe to be put on a soup label and it's one of their most searched recipes today.

I have never had Tomato Soup Cake nor had I ever heard of it until I found the UT Book. I'll admit it was the recipe that caught my eye when I was flipping through the book at the vintage store. The ingredient was one thing but it's also one of the few recipes that has a specific source, Mrs. Gibson. I wonder a lot of things about Mrs. Gibson including pondering which type of frosting she would use on her version of the cake. Since the recipe mentions the frosting, it helps put the notebook into a specific time frame - the late 1960s or early 1970s. During this period, frosting finally makes it way into the recipe. The popularity of carrot cake in the 1970s and its cream cheese frosting are partially responsible for this. Many of the modern versions of the recipe pair it with cream cheese frosting rather than chocolate or lemon as the older versions reference. As I researched the recipe I found more and more people who love this cake. One person commented on a blog that he/she has this cake every year for their birthday and have been doing so for 40 years. What a great historical cake!

It's a lot like a carrot cake, specifically in the spices used for the batter. Cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg combine with tomato soup, sugar, Crisco, and other dry ingredients to make a light cake that's sort of red in color. It smelled a bit like fall as I mixed it together. No pan size was mentioned in the UT Book recipe; the ones online varied from 9x13 to 8 inch square pans. I split the difference and used a disposable 8x12 pan I happened to have; it seemed to work just fine. It was easy to mix up and took ten minutes less to bake than the recipe indicated. This is probably my oven specifically; it tends to bake things faster. Some recipes include the addition of raisins and nuts like a carrot cake but this one does not so I left them out.



For the frosting, I opted for my standard vanilla buttercream recipe because it's awesome (not to brag or anything) and because several of my co-workers have an aversion to cream cheese frosting. I don't get it but I'd rather they enjoy the cake instead of complain about the frosting. A handful of my co-workers knew what the secret ingredient was in advance because I've been discussing this cake obsessively for weeks. I didn't tell everyone though, and made a little sign using one of the other names for the cake, Secret Ingredient Cake. I asked anyone who tried the cake if they could guess the secret ingredient. Both this name and Mystery Cake were used to hide the fact that the cake included tomato soup. I wanted to hide it as long as possible from my co-workers/testers.

The verdict?

It took several people before anyone guessed the secret ingredient. One person named all of the other ingredients but could not place the secret one. Some of the other guesses included: pumpkin, applesauce, apples, licorice, and brown sugar. Only one person said that had she known what the secret ingredient was in advance, she probably wouldn't have eaten it but was glad that she was brave and had a piece. Some of the group who knew what the ingredient was in advance said they only noticed the tomato soup taste on the first bite and it wasn't even that strong of a taste; this wasn't true for everyone who knew the ingredient though. I didn't get the taste at all but maybe that was because I tried the batter before trying the cake. We also discussed the color - it's not quite red, not quite orange but it's really pretty and makes for a lovely cake. I did get two requests for cream cheese frosting despite the haters in the office. Maybe next time.

Overall score for this recipe: I'm going to give it an A. It was super easy to make, tastes like fall, and gave me an excuse to make really good frosting. I'd make this again using the UT Book recipe or using one of the other recipes I found while doing research.

In addition to finding another great recipe to add to my repertoire, I'm also looking forward to reading Kate Moses's novel Wintering and contemplating Sylvia Plath, her work, her death, and her baking.

Blog posts:
The Enduring Allure of Tomato Soup Cake
A Spicy History of Campbell's Tomato Soup Cake
Images:
Campbell's recipe
Tips for Housewives
All others by me