You may notice in the tags of this post that one says “the beer ran down my mustache.” While I do have a bit of a mustache (hell yeah to Ashkenazi heritage combined with my decision to remove body hair as little as possible) and while I am not always the neatest drinker of beer, that’s not what the tag is about. It’s a common closing formula in Russian wonder tales, where the teller, upon finishing some grand love story, will say: I was at their wedding and drank beer. The beer ran along my mustache but did not go into my mouth. The most familiar English-language formula is Once upon a time, but I’m not interested in battling Disney SEO and it’s far less evocative of food, drink, and the role they have in celebrations and in stories.
(Here is a good piece on opening and closing formulas. I would like to state for the record that, in keeping with my collector/obsessive personality, I own every book in the Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library. The old covers, too. I hate the new ones.)
At any rate, I love a good story; I love food with a story; I love a story with food. So my plan for this blog is to do some exploration of food in folklore, matching recipes to fairy tales in a way that is authentic to the story. We are starting with my favorite, naturally: Little Red Riding Hood. Most friends think of me when they think of that story. I own a red hooded coat and red knit caps. I cannot quite put my finger on why I am so attached to this particular tale (perhaps if I ever do write a cookbook, as I am dreaming of doing, I will have figured it out by then), but it combines a lot of story elements that I love: the color red; wolves and werewolves; the knowing loss of innocence coupled with plausible deniability; loving grandmothers; quiet, metaphorical forest paths; cake.
There are different versions of Little Red Riding Hood, including the well-known Brothers Grimm version, the more literary Charles Perrault tale, and a French peasant story called “The Grandmother’s Tale.” Food is central to all three of these, whether it’s the cake and butter in Perrault’s telling, the cake and wine in the Grimms’, or the hot loaf, milk, flesh-meat and blood-wine in the “original” (inasmuch as any wonder tale can be original) story. In “The Grandmother’s Tale,” the flesh and blood that our heroine consumes explicitly symbolizes her loss of innocence, helpfully pointed out to us by a cat that calls her a slut for consuming her grandmother’s body. (A side note: did you know that “seeing the wolf” used to mean having sex for the first time? If you’re interested in more fun facts and analysis about the family of Little Red Riding Hood tales, I highly recommend Catherine Orenstein’s Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked. Hilariously, when I was a teenager, I was given my copy by my grandmother after she saw it on my birthday wishlist.)
The hot loaf is fresh bread, and the cakes are certainly not frosted layer cakes, as comes to mind these days. They were likely loaf cakes, which you can and should toast and spread with butter and eat with wine (preferably not made from your murdered grandma’s blood). So if you’re planning to stray from the forest path, I recommend making this reading-in-the-rafters parkin from Ella Risbridger’s Midnight Chicken, a really great cookbook that made me cry and also made my head swirl with ideas about what a cookbook can look like and how it can be read. I am calling this version “adventure cake” because I kept calling it that when I couldn’t remember the real name. I made it originally last September (this post has been a long time in the making!), before my girlfriend and I drove upstate to go hiking and eat at Roscoe Diner, where my family often stopped on drives to Canada when I was in university. I don’t have any rafters to read in, but this cake is perfect for going on adventures you’re living (hiking) or adventures you’re being brought along on (reading books full of wonder). When it was me and her, we ate at the diner, then tried to find the trail we were intending to hike, getting a bit lost along the way. Eventually we found it, and brought the cake with us, and ate it with our hands sitting by a very beautiful waterfall. We didn’t finish it that day, so it came back home with us and got gently pan-fried in butter, as Little Red’s grandmother would have done (had she not been eaten by a wolf).
Below is the recipe. I adapted some of the ingredients to American ones (the original calls for treacle and muscovado sugar, for example), but am keeping the weight-based ingredient list because you ought to have a scale. If you want to convert to volume, this chart from King Arthur Flour will help.
Adventure cake
Adapted from Ella Risbridger’s Midnight Chicken
Makes 1 loaf
The basket
100 grams salted butter
100 grams light brown sugar
100 grams robust molasses
100 grams golden syrup
I left this in because I had Lyle’s, but you can substitute light corn syrup 1:1
150 ml skim or 2% milk
2 eggs
125 grams self-rising flour, or
120 grams all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp fine sea salt
100 grams rolled oats
4 tsp ground ginger
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 tsp ground mixed spice, or
1/4 tsp allspice
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp cloves
The path
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Butter a loaf pan, then line it with parchment paper, pressing it against the buttered sides so it will stick.
Combine butter, sugar, molasses, and golden syrup in a large saucepan. Heat over low heat and stir until you have a smooth syrup, then remove from heat and cool until it’s barely warm.
In a medium bowl, combine milk and eggs. Beat until smooth.
In a large bowl, combine flour, oats, and spices. Add barely-warm syrup, and mix (with a spoon, electric mixer, stand mixer, or even your hands if you really want) to make a stiff dough. Slowly pour in egg-milk mixture while stirring, and mix until just combined. Pour batter into the loaf pan.
Bake for 40-50 minutes (for me, it was 50 min), until a skewer or toothpick comes out nearly clean. Using the parchment paper as a grip, remove the loaf from the pan, and put it (still in its paper) on a wire rack to cool.
Wait at least 20 minutes, or more, until it’s cooled before cutting a slice. Spread with a pot of butter and pair with blood-red wine.