Black Cake

Black cake is a Caribbean dessert, a kind of fruit cake doused liberally with rum and usually prepared for holidays and family gatherings. Although it looks like a simple dark chocolate cake (hence the name), the color comes from its exotic blend of dark fruit, mostly raisins, currants, prunes, and cherries, carefully marinated in a heavy, syrupy liquid of rum and wine. All of it is held together in a rich batter of cooked sugars, sweet island spices, and sifted flour cut with brown sugar. In addition to its adlibbed recipe (the baker tends to add the ingredients in a kind of spontaneous creativity—initially, it riles Benny that her mother’s recipe is only a list of ingredients, no measure of how much), the black cake is distinguishable by its complex texture, soft and yielding, crusty and flaky, doughy and chewy—the ingredients creating a layered architecture in which no one element dominates the taste experience. It is a dessert all about fusion.

The sole memory Covey has of her mother before her mother’s mysterious disappearance when Covey was five is of the two of them making black cake together. Covey remembers—and in turn passes it on to her daughter Benny—her mother telling her even as she mixed up the sweet dessert that this was more than a cake, “this is your heritage” (139), gifting the cake with potent symbolic weight.