My big, nasty Panamanian bride's cake
It was my turn to bake my grandmother's beloved recipe. But when I opened the oven, I had a pan of boozy fruit slop.
By Sarah Inez Levy
Read more: Family, Recipes, Weddings, Life, Eat and Drink, Food and Travel
July 24, 2007 | When my only sister asked me to bake a traditional Panamanian cake for her wedding, I was thrilled. The cake had been in our clan for generations, and before our grandmother passed away, she personally prepared one for every marriage celebration -- stretching out to those of our fourth and fifth cousins. I felt honored to carry on the ritual in her memory.
Panamanian wedding cake, a dark, spiced fruitcake, actually originated in the Caribbean, where a hearty infusion of alcohol kept the confection from going bad in the tropical heat. The married couple keeps the top layer of this "bride's cake" to eat on their first anniversary and cuts the remainder into square pieces that are distributed to wedding guests in small gift boxes. Thirty years ago, when my grandmother was preparing my parents' cake, she threw out her back and had to leave the fruit to soak in liquor for months longer than the typical two weeks. Their cake was quite pungent, but not hurt in the least by the extra weeks of steeping. My parents ate the top layer on their fifth anniversary. A third cousin saved hers for 10 years and reported that it still tasted just fine.
During the Inquisition, my Spanish ancestors were forced to flee their homes, scattering across western Europe. A large portion landed in the Netherlands and a minority journeyed on to the Caribbean, where they settled into steamy island life on Curaçao and St. Thomas. Eventually, a small group of those emigrants sought their fortune in Panama, bringing along with them the Caribbean-influenced cake recipe. It was there, in a little enclave of Central American Jews, that my grandmother, Emita, was born. She met my grandfather, a nice Jewish boy from Connecticut, when he was stationed at the Panama Canal with the Air Force during World War II. Forty-three years later, I was born, one-quarter Panamanian -- a relatively small portion of my heritage that I nonetheless find to be the spiciest. My Hispanic pedigree, however, is tricky to detect: I speak little Spanish, have loads of freckles and am prone to heat rash in tropical climes. So maybe I can be forgiven for feeling that my sister's wedding cake presented a rare opportunity to connect with my roots. In any case, I jumped on it.
When my grandmother died I inherited her recipe book, a red binder with duct tape not quite holding the spine together. The "miscellaneous" section includes no fewer than five distinct versions of the bride's cake written on worn index cards, each with addenda and comments of various colors squished into the margins. Emita kept impeccable notes from each occasion she made the cake, logging on Post-its the price of prunes, almonds, raisins, citron, etc. for every year since 1971. And yet the only instructions she left about the actual assembly of the cake were: "Bake 275 degrees with pan of water on floor of oven. Bakes about 2.5-3 hours, more for large layers."
My only other reference material was an exceptionally old copy of the recipe that once hung in a frame on Emita's living room wall. It was signed by its scribe, but with a family tree full of recycled names, even my most genealogy-obsessed aunt could not confirm its source. We guessed that it was probably an early version of the bride's cake from St. Thomas, but in any case, it was old enough that the tape once used to salvage the tearing creases had browned and melted into the paper, which itself was fragile and disintegrating, with faded, illegible script. It made for magnificent art, but no matter how hard I stared, no miraculous kitchen tips from my ancestors materialized.
For hours I flipped back and forth among Emita's recipe cards, eventually settling on the version she used for my parents' wedding in 1973. I smiled to think of my dad in his maroon, bell-bottom groom's suit and my mother with ironed-straight hair down to her waist. Minus the citron, the ingredients were easy enough to find, and I soon had 8 pounds of dried fruit plumping in a soup of brandy and cherry liqueur atop my fridge.
As the fruit reigned over the kitchen from its high perch, I pored over cookbooks and scoured the Web for guidance. Some sources told me to mix the fruit with the dry ingredients, others with the wet. Some instructed me to add nuts at the beginning, others at the end. But by the end of the two-week soaking period, I had a plan for a test run and was itching to start.
The operation began smoothly enough. To the boozy fruit, I added pineapple cooked in brown sugar, 2 pounds of almonds and a sprinkling of spices. My recipe then called for me to process the fruit and nuts in a Cuisinart -- which I did not own -- but having long managed without one, I was unfazed. I scooped the first fruit-nut batch into my trusty blender and pressed "grind." The blade whirred futilely, groaning against the sticky glob. I shook the machine violently and tried pushing every button, to no avail: puree, liquefy, chop -- even the supremely promising "ice grinder."
