PUT A LITTLE MORAVIAN SPICE ONTO YOUR HOLIDAY TABLE
By Emily Battle
Buttery crumbles of brown sugary goodness.
That's all I could think of as I stood there, leafing through a cookbook in my local public library, suddenly confronted with one of my all-time favorite holiday sweet things.
The book was Bill Neal's Southern Cooking, written by the late Chapel Hill chef and restaurateur, and the recipe was for Moravian sugar cake, a holiday staple and go-to gift for out-of-towners for my family and countless others in Winston-Salem, N.C., where I grew up.
As a brief history lesson, Winston and Salem were originally two towns. Winston was an industrial center named for a Revolutionary War hero, and the place where tobacco giant Richard Joshua Reynolds chose to build his empire. Salem was a small village and religious center settled by Moravians who had migrated down from Pennsylvania.
As an elementary-school student in Winston-Salem (the two towns merged in 1913), I was led on endless field trips through Old Salem, the preserved and restored version of the original village of Salem.
I'm sure there are lots of important things my teachers wanted me to glean from those tours, but my favorite memory of those trips comes from the year we were let behind the curtain in the Winkler Bakery, the preserved version of the village's bakery that now operates as a commercial enterprise.
Amid trays and trays of thin brown Moravian spice cookies, I caught my first glimpse at raw sugar cake, its lumpy landscape glistening with a mix of sugar and butter that would only get more deliciously gooey as it cooked in the oven it was about to be thrust into. These cakes are basically a flat layer of sweetened, buttery bread with lots of holes poked in the top. Onto that lunar-like surface, a mixture of butter, sugar and spice is poured before baking. The result is a breakfast bread with a sweet, crusty top. The best part is the indentations, where lumps of sugary goodness gather. These are the bites that young children will fight with their siblings over.
My husband and I ordered a few of these cakes from Winston-Salem's Dewey's bakery over the Internet last year to give as gifts (and of course, we kept one for ourselves). It had never occurred to me to make the treat myself until I spotted the recipe that day in the library. Though it would mean taking my first stab at bread-baking, I figured the result would be worth stepping outside of my comfort zone.
If you're like me, and have an aversion to recipes that call for those scary yellow packets of baker's yeast, I encourage you to broaden your culinary horizons.
Nothing builds kitchen confidence like that moment when, having mixed wet ingredients with yeast and added flour, a malleable dough suddenly springs to life before your eyes. Kneading brought back memories of making Play-Do pizzas, and although this won't be a recipe I add to my "last-minute potluck" list, it was fun poking my thumb into the dough-filled baking dishes to make way for the sweet topping. Incidentally, Neal's book includes a note that "Moravian wisdom has it that a miserly cook uses her index finger, the generous one her thumb."
Once these cakes popped into the oven in all of their sugar-coated glory, my house immediately smelled like Christmas. In fact, it still does. (For those of you who read my fried chicken column, this is a scent you won't want to block from any room-it beats any holiday-scented candle money can buy.)
The product looked exactly like it should-a homemade, more rustic version of a holiday treat I've been buying commercially for years. My husband and I are still enjoying the cake we kept for ourselves, and my coworkers wolfed down a whole jellyroll pan full of it in just a couple of hours.
I would recommend adding this Moravian classic to your holiday table. Should you want to try it, there are endless versions of the recipe available on the Internet. If you seek out the one in Neal's book, you'll be rewarded with a good dose of Southern culinary history and snippets from some of the region's literary classics along the way.
Google will lead you to several postings of the Winkler Bakery sugar cake recipe, which calls for dry mashed potatoes and dry milk, two ingredients that aren't in Neal's recipe. It also calls for the topping to be added by sprinkling the brown sugar and cinnamon on the cake, and then adding butter, while I thought it was more fun to melt the whole heavenly mix into a pot of warm liquid goodness, then pour it over the cake and watch the mixture gather in the thumbprints.
There is still one easier and foolproof recipe for this holiday delight, and it requires only two ingredients: one credit card and one computer with Internet access, with the Dewey's Bakery Web site pulled up.
However you choose to bring Moravian sugar cake into your holiday food lineup, I assure you, it won't disappoint.
____ Emily Battle is a professional journalist who lives in Fredericksburg, Va. Visions of sugar plums have been replaced by sugar cakes, dancing in her head.
Copyright 2006 The Southern Ledger. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
