Virtually no other velvet cakes appear in cookbooks or on menus today, but red velvet endures. After surviving the early 2010s, when red velvet flavored, colored or scented a barrage of consumables, including granola, car fresheners, bagels and body wash, it’s settled into a spot squarely alongside standards like carrot cake, pineapple upside-down, Brooklyn blackout, devil’s food, Boston cream pie and Funfetti. Nostalgia has helped, but so has a new generation of bakers employing Instagram and TikTok to show off their red velvet cake creations, some for fun, some for sale.
“A lot of people who celebrate Juneteenth won’t celebrate Juneteenth without it,” says Adrian Miller, a culinary historian. “So, some Black people chide me for not putting [red velvet] in my book.” In 2014, Miller published “Soul Food: The Surprising Story of an American Cuisine One Plate at a Time,” which traces the history of Black food in the United States through more than a dozen dishes — but red velvet isn’t among them.
“My argument is that ‘soul food’ is the food Black people are eating outside of the South, to nourish their souls,” Miller says. “There’s a lot of overlap, but it’s actually something different.” After diving into its history, Miller says he believes Black diners’ embrace of red velvet is relatively recent.
Recipes for velvet cake, named to describe its plush texture, started to appear in cookbooks in the late 1800s, though these were sometimes pancakes or yeast-risen shortcakes. In his 1911 cookbook “Good Things to Eat,” former enslaved person and chef Rufus Estes included a recipe for a sweet “velvet cake,” enriched with four eggs and almond flour.
How velvet cakes turned red is a topic of frequent debate, and probably occurred in several places in the United States at different times, and for different reasons.
In the late 1800s, the first recipes for chocolate cake called for bars of chocolate to be grated or melted into the batter. Devil’s food cake stood out for its significant amount of chocolate and rich flavor. Some batters were moistened with hot water; others with coffee, milk or buttermilk. When cocoa powder began appearing on store shelves in the early 1900s, it quickly replaced chocolate bars in cake recipes. But this wasn’t the dark cocoa we see today. It was raw cocoa, which contains higher levels of anthocyanin, a pigment found in plants, fruits and vegetables that turns them blue, purple or red, depending on their pH. So, when raw cocoa is used in batter alongside an acidic ingredient such as buttermilk, the cake takes on a burgundy hue. That’s how, in the mid-1900s, red devil, along with mahogany and oxblood cakes, were born.
Separately, starting during World War I rationing and the Great Depression, bakers short on dairy and eggs started using homegrown fruits and vegetables to moisten their cakes. Cakes made with grated beets or beet juice came out of the oven tinted red.
Though they’re full of flavor and depth, some say these maroon-colored cakes aren’t the real deal. “A real red velvet has to be red, really red,” says pastry chef Dolester Miles, who serves her version for holidays and special occasions at Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Ala. It’s tart with buttermilk and a splash of vinegar, decorated with cream cheese frosting and pecans — “because I’m a pecan freak!” — and for a cake the color of Santa’s suit, Miles says, a little food coloring goes a long way.
In the late 1930s, after the government more clearly outlined regulations regarding the sale of food coloring and additives, the Adams Extract Co., then based in Austin, started bottling red food coloring in earnest. To market the new product, they produced tear-off recipe cards and posters with an easy recipe for red velvet cake that featured the company’s food coloring, and a recipe for snow-white ermine or boiled-milk frosting. Skeptics derided the unholy additive, but children and adults fell hard for the cake’s eye-catching, candy-striped coloring, fluffy texture and sweet, not quite chocolate, not quite vanilla flavor. Around the same time, red velvet appeared on the menu at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City and at Eaton’s Department Store chain in Canada — both of which claimed to have invented it. (In 1943, a recipe for red velvet with red food coloring was printed in “The Joy of Cooking.”)
Red velvet has been on the menu at Stein’s Bakery in Dallas since it opened in the early 1860s, according to baker Juan Alvarado, whose family purchased Stein’s in 2002. Originally located in Rockdale, less than two hours from Adams’ Extract Co., food coloring found its way into the bakery’s red velvet when it relocated to Dallas in the 1940s.
“People love it,” baker Alvarado says. “We use a little more food coloring than the Steins did, because people like it really red, but its flavor is more from the cocoa and buttermilk.”
In the 1940s and 1950s, Adams’ cake recipe spread across the country like a red wave, and the company takes credit for cementing the connection between red food coloring and red velvet’s sustained popularity. (Though some food colorings can cause an allergic reaction in some people, the FDA has approved Allura Red AC or FD&C Red 40 as safe.)
“That luxurious-sounding recipe for ‘Red Velvet Cake with Ermine Icing’ has to be taken out of the files and traded around just about once a year or so,” wrote Katharine Zadravec in her June 24, 1965, Washington Post column, which included a food coloring-red recipe sent in by a reader. By the late 1960s, red velvet cake could be found on school lunch menus and at church socials. That’s probably how it became associated, especially in parts of the South and Great Plains, with Easter and Christmas.
Its popularity in the Northeast and West grew further when it appeared in the 1989 movie “Steel Magnolias.” A few years later, it landed on the menu at New York’s Magnolia Bakery just as the cupcake craze began.
Today, in part because it’s reliably found at bakeries in historically Black neighborhoods, including around Washington, D.C., in Harlem and parts of Los Angeles, and is often a centerpiece at Juneteenth celebrations, many Black Americans claim it as their own. And indeed, the history of baking in the United States owes a substantial debt to Black bakers. But neither Toni Tipton-Martin, editor in chief of Cook’s Country magazine and author of “The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cookbooks,” nor Miller have uncovered much evidence of its roots in Black communities. They say the first time a recipe for a chocolate cake with red food coloring appears in a book by an African-American author is in former “Ebony” magazine food editor Freda DeKnight’s 1948 “A Date with a Dish: A Cook Book of American Negro Recipes Hardcover.”
Though food coloring is ubiquitous today, even 40 years ago it would have been considered an expensive, luxury ingredient, says Taylor, who is working on her next book, “Watermelon and Red Birds, an essential cookbook for the all-American celebration of Juneteenth.” That DeKnight, an editor at a magazine targeted at stylish middle-class Black Americans, was among the first to publish a recipe using it, demonstrates how aspirational it once was. Today, pretty much anyone can afford to bake a ruby red cake.
Daneisha Simon, pastry chef and owner of the Atlanta-based bakeshop Pastry Addict, says that when she was growing up in Georgia, red velvet “was one of those staples.” The recipe she makes today is based on her grandmother’s, though she uses buttermilk where her grandmother used vinegar.
“It’s not so much about the taste of the cake,” she says. “It’s about the color — it has to be really red. It’s about the scent. It should smell sweet, like a rich cocoa, but also tart from the buttermilk.” Simon, who bakes the cake into wedding cakes, cupcakes and tall cylinders, says it’s one of her best sellers in February, June and December.
Oakland, Calif.-based chef and restaurateur Tanya Holland also thinks of it as a celebration cake. “It’s what people want for any big event,” she says. Though Holland’s parents were “pie and cheesecake people,” Holland says that while growing up in Rochester, N.Y., she saw red velvet cake around. “When I opened my restaurant, I knew I had to have it on the menu,” she says. Holland tints the cake she serves at Brown Sugar Kitchen with food coloring, but she’s working on a recipe that uses beets for her next cookbook, “California Soul.” Out in the fall of 2022, it will cover the influence African Americans have had on California cuisine.
Taylor, who is allergic to Red 40, the primary artificial red food coloring sold by Adams and McCormick today, is intrigued by red velvet cakes that use natural fruit or vegetable juices. “I know people want that red, really red cake,” she says. “But if it’s not bright red, is it red velvet? I think as long as it brings joy, yes.”
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