http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/dining/16Bake.html?em By KIM SEVERSON
Published: December 15, 2009
IN this corner of the country, where cotton and peanuts pay the bills and the Florida border is a morning?s walk away, the worth of a cook can be measured in cake layers.
All across the South at Christmas, layer cakes parade across virtually every sideboard. But in the small towns of southeast Alabama, they are more than holiday tradition.
They?re currency, comfort and status. Everyone knows whose cakes are tender and whose consistently reach 12 layers or more.
?Three or four weren?t nothing to brag about,? said Franklin Peacock, who has been eating layer cake here since the 1930s. ?Five or six is about where you?d want to start talking about your cake.?
Martha Meadows, 77, learned to bake 15-layer cakes from her mother, who cooked each layer one at a time in a cast-iron hoe-cake pan. The pan now lives in a kitchen cupboard in the small house in a cotton field between this town and Slocomb, Ala., where Mrs. Meadows has lived for 34 years.
Published: December 15, 2009
IN this corner of the country, where cotton and peanuts pay the bills and the Florida border is a morning?s walk away, the worth of a cook can be measured in cake layers.
All across the South at Christmas, layer cakes parade across virtually every sideboard. But in the small towns of southeast Alabama, they are more than holiday tradition.
They?re currency, comfort and status. Everyone knows whose cakes are tender and whose consistently reach 12 layers or more.
?Three or four weren?t nothing to brag about,? said Franklin Peacock, who has been eating layer cake here since the 1930s. ?Five or six is about where you?d want to start talking about your cake.?
Martha Meadows, 77, learned to bake 15-layer cakes from her mother, who cooked each layer one at a time in a cast-iron hoe-cake pan. The pan now lives in a kitchen cupboard in the small house in a cotton field between this town and Slocomb, Ala., where Mrs. Meadows has lived for 34 years.
