Bloody Butcher Benne Oil Cake

In the South, we have a pie called a chess pie. The joke goes that in a thick Southern accent, when a woman said "It's just pie" it came out sounding like "It's jes pie" which sounds a lot like "chess pie."  No one can swear to the origin, but I like this one so I am sticking with it.

The beauty of a chess pie comes from its simplicity as the ingredients that one needs to make it are almost always in the larder. You might not have what it takes to make chocolate cake or blackberry cobbler but on any given day, a chess pie could be whipped up in almost any kitchen.

In an Italian kitchen, the equivalent to the chess pie is the polenta olive oil cake. Like the chess pie, the ingredients are usually in the larder, it is easy to make, and comes through in a pinch.  In a bit of irony, the ingredients for both desserts are roughly the same.  Like a chess pie, a polenta olive oil cake can be flavored with a variety of seasonings, from vanilla to citrus to almond and most anything in between.  An olive oil polenta cake is a godsend for a canning kitchen.  It is a perfect foil for that last jar of stiff marmalade or runny jam.

Olive oil polenta cake recipes flood the Internet. Every chef and blogger has one. The ingredients are all basically the same.  One cup of the following: flour, corn meal, sugar, eggs, and oil plus baking powder and salt for leavening and a flavoring.  A cup of eggs is about 4 large eggs. Flour usually outweighs the corn meal, but these dry ingredients will still usually equal two cups, so less cornmeal (3/4 cup) with the rest being made up in the flour (1 1/4 cups).

Let us digress -- on a personal note, I love an organized pantry.

But some days...

it all goes to hell.

Recently, this was indeed the case and I ventured in to bring order from chaos. Face it, the more things I picked up, the more things I thought about cooking. Two item turned up in morass that made me start thinking about an old Italian polenta olive oil cake.  Neither of them was polenta nor olive oil.

Let us digress further -- as almost everything I do leads me back to the library.  One of my favorite books published last year was Southern Provisions by David Shields. Shields has a title so long we won't even go into it, needless to say the guy has serious chops. His passion is bringing about a revival of lost Southern foods and agricultural practises. Southern Provisions is part Southern history, part agricultural history, part mystery, part botany, part cookbook, and all around fantastic read. Every book he mentions, you want to read; every recipe, you want to cook; and every spare inch of soil, you want to plant. His work has helped revive real deal Southern cuisine, not the fictionalized romanticism of Southern food. Not to mention the man is married to a woman named, Lucinda!

In the last few years, one of the Southern crops seeing a huge revival is benne.  If you have read Southern Provisions you would know all this; if not buy yourself a copy. Benne is a type of sesame seed brought to America by African slaves. While Thomas Jefferson was trying to produce olive trees to establish a source of fine oil in America, he overlooked the oil producing benne. When Jefferson was presented with a bottle of benne oil from Georgia, he was smitten. Over the next two centuries, benne fell out of favor and production for the most part ceased.  Benne oil never became a larder staple...unless you happen to be searching in my larder.

While cleaning up my mess I ran across a bottle of benne seed oil.  Much like Thomas Jefferson, I too, received a bottle from Georgia.  Oliver Farms in Georgia is currently the only producer of benne oil. It makes a great finishing oil, drizzled over cooked vegetables, or topping a soup.  I love to take day-old cornbread, sliced thin and toasted, sprinkled with some dried fish peppers, then dipped in benne oil.  Another Appalachian favorite is a nutty pesto with ramps and  hickory nuts, bound with benne.  Then, I was gifted a couple of bottles of benne oil and it was quite a gift as the oil is quite pricey. The first gift bottle was quickly used up, but the second had languished, lost and unfinished in the clutter.

The first line in Southern Provisions reads, "Southern food, like Italian food, is a universally recognized category..." Now you are having the same "ah ha" moment that I had.  Especially when you consider that the other item I found lost and alone was less that a cup of a popular West Virgina corn variety, Bloody Butcher.  Bloody Butcher is a red dent corn grown and ground for years in West Virginia. When ground, bits of the red kernels fleck the dark, rich meal, giving it a toothy crunch. Normally, using benne oil in a cake would seem like an extravagance, but since oils will become rancid over time, and since I didn't have a lot of experience with the shelf life of benne oil, I decided it was a "use it or lose it" moment.

I checked the oil and ended up with a full cup and a touch more for one last hurrah. The corn meal was just a hair under 3/4 cup. The Bloody Butcher Benne Oil Cake was a go.

The Bloody Butcher Benne Oil Cake

3/4 cup Bloody Butcher corn meal
1 cup AP flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cups sugar
4 eggs
1 cup benne oil
1 tablespoon grated orange peel

Preheat oven to 350.

Lightly oil a 9 inch spring form pan.

In a medium bowl, mix the AP flour, corn meal, baking powder and salt, whisk to mix.

In another bowl, cream the eggs and sugar, beating until light and lemony in color. Stir in the orange zest.

To the sugar/egg mixture alternate the dry ingredients and the oil using about 1/3 of the dry ingredients, then about 1/3 of the oil, so you will end with the oil.

Pour the mixture into the prepared pan, and bake for 35 minutes or until a toothpick comes out of the cake clean.

Allow the cake to rest in the pan another 10 - 20 minutes before unmolding.

Sprinkle the top with confectioners sugar.

Of course, one could make this cake with polenta and olive oil, but it loses its Appalachian/Southern cred if you do!

Ube Pound Cake

I ran across a recipe for an ube pound cake online. Now, as with so many things online, especially recipes, a lot of people post them without any attribution, which kind of sucks because when someone posts a recipe, they are happy to share it, they just don't you reposting it on your site without the slightest thank you. 

Over at Asian in America, Betty Ann posted her recipe for an ube pound cake. It was really cool and pretty unique -- the "pound" part not the "ube" part. When she got ready to make this cake, and even though it was a very original idea, she used another pound cake recipe on which to base her cake. She used a recipe from Nancie McDermott's cookbook Southern Cakes and she credited it!

Many years ago, over at Cookbook Of The Day, we did a post about a White Fruitcake. The recipe is credited to Eudora Welty, though Miss Eudora was always quick to point out that she stole the recipe. And speaking of Southern cakes, Miss Eudora's stolen recipe also found its way into McDermott's Southern Cakes. 

I made my ube pound cake in a Lucinda's Wood Cake Box, so I tweaked the recipe a bit.  I would have never made it if my friend, Jurry, hadn't dropped what she was doing to head over to the Filipino market to score my ube. I made the above cake and a spare to send out to Jurry.

One cannot always find a clear attribution to recipes.  I often see MY cornbread recipe printed in many places and I can assure you it is the same cornbread recipe my great-great-on-and-on grandmother made. It's even the same skillet!  So it is mine. People are always writing books on where this or that recipe came from. Go ahead, ask a Southerner the exact origin of the Red Velvet Cake.  Everyone thinks they know...

I think recipes are a lot like songs. You sing them in the kitchen, and sometime you sing louder, and sometime you sing slower, and sometime you have to look up the words, and the vast majority of the time you sing it, even if you didn't write it. But if you do know where a recipe comes from, say thanks.

So join in the chorus:

Click on over to Asian in America for her recipe.

Buy yourself a copy of Southern Cakes, for good recipes and even better stories.

Make friends with Jurry, or another Filipino to help you find unique ingredients

Always bake extra and remember, you are never in the kitchen alone.