Dot’s Dough – “Cake don’t change the bad things, honey, just makes them taste better.”
My Godmother, Dot Lefler, was a simple woman. Sturdy, honest—homespun as the day is long. She’d owned one store-bought dress her whole life, and that was a gift from her daughter who got educated and moved to the big city and married a pickle magnate. (Who knew there was such a thing? Rich people amaze me. Not because they’re rich but why.) She offered to buy her mother more but, “I reckon one of these would be enough.”
Dot lived in what we all called a “company house.” 900 square feet of two-story simplicity owned by the lumber and furniture company my Godfather, Russ, worked for. Linoleum floors, a covered front “stoop,” a living room with a 10-gallon aquarium and two hyper-active little neon fish, a wood stove for heat and a tiny kitchen with a two-burner stove and just enough counter space to hold her bright red Kitchen-Aid mixer. The mixer was a very coveted item, all the women in Rainelle West Virginia knew she had it (Actually, all the real cooks in the state knew she owned it…). She’d won it, fair and square, at the state fair the year the flour company sponsored the cake-baking contest. She made the best pound cake in the state and while everyone already knew that, the cake contest made it official. Now, in case you don’t know what a REAL pound cake is (not the ones you buy at the grocery filled with trans- fat and artificial flavors and coloring and stuff you can’t pronounce) here’s her secret recipe:
1 pound of butter
1 dozen eggs
vanilla
a tad of lemon zest
2 cups, or thereabouts, of sugar
1 t leavening on hand
twice-sifted flour
Now, you’ll notice that the amounts of a few ingredients aren’t specified. That’s because it’s a secret recipe. Actually, that’s not exactly true. The “secret” behind any great cook is their ability to know, to sense, what’s enough. And Dot had made enough cakes to “know” when enough was enough.
She was a daughter of the Great Depression. Waste not—want not. And since the company Russ worked for wasn’t known for its generosity, there wasn’t much in her life that could be wasted. But Dot was a resourceful woman. She kept chickens, so she always had eggs. She saved them up for Saturday, so she’d have a dozen to bake a cake for Sunday lunch. She saved for the butter, too, because Russ sure loved a good pound cake and she sure loved that man. The pound cake was her way of saying it. That and the way she stroked the hump on his back at night, the one that had come up from all his years of leaning over a lathe in the factory, making spindles for cherry-wood beds (like the one I got for my 16th birthday and still sleep in). By the time I knew them, it was like the hump was there for her to hold onto, it fit her hand so perfectly.
Dot was a kind, generous woman. Out of her nothing, she gave a lot and I learned a lot from that. I asked my mother once why she had asked Dot to be my Godmother, instead of the more elegant women who formed most of her social circle. “Because you’ll learn things from her you can’t learn anywhere else,” she answered.
Whenever there was a tragedy in that tiny town (someone was “laid down” from an accident in the mill, there was a death or a stillborn or a woman got beat up on Friday from the liquor of payday) a pound cake appeared. It was Dot’s way of loving people. She was a woman of few words, and since words rarely fix things anyway, she gave people cakes instead of advice. Folks loved her for that.
Sometimes when I was visiting, such a tragedy had happened. She’d let me feed the two little fish in the 10-gallon aquarium and then I’d perch on the stool in the kitchen and watch her make the pound cake. While I licked the spoon, she’d pop the cake in the oven and say, “Cake don’t change the bad things, honey, just makes them taste better.” And looking back on that now, mother was right. I learned some things from Dot I wouldn’t have learned anywhere else.
