a place for stories & histories
I Am I Am I Am Cake
the old brag of my heart
“I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.
I am, I am, I am.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
I’m not the person to write about Sylvia Plath. Her work, it deserves a scholar’s life study. I just make cakes. I read myself to sleep every night and ponder the meanings while standing at my baking bench the next day.
But I am a woman, I am a person who has struggled with mental illness, I am human. And I have never read a book so deeply relatable as The Bell Jar.
Do I need to say things like The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath’s only novel? That it was published, under a pseudonym, shortly before Sylvia Plath ended her own life in February 1963? That the novel, largely autobiographical, centers around Esther Greenwood, a college-aged woman who has everything and finds none of it is enough? That it’s one of the most famous depictions of mental illness, and portrays it in a way that is so painful, so lucid, and so, so true? Can I have required reading for this essay? First on the list, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
Here, let’s begin with arguably the most famous passage from the novel. The main thing you need to know is that Esther reads a story about a fig tree, and then she goes out on a date with a simultaneous interpreter named Constantin.
The trouble was, I had been inadequate all along, I simply hadn’t thought about it.
The one thing I was good at was winning scholarships and prizes, and that era was coming to an end.
I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit, his days of glory shrunk to a little gold cup on his mantel with a date engraved on it like the date on a tombstone.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is largely autobiographical, and knowing the story of Plath’s life, knowing the story doesn’t end where she left it in The Bell Jar but with something much more tragic and real, those are part of the story, too.
It’s a little easy to discount this whole passage, because immediately after, Esther discounts it herself: she goes out to dinner with her date and finds her worries of withering figs and lost opportunities dripping away, feeling her despair “might well have arisen from the profound void of an empty stomach.”
I think about the thoughts we have while “not ourselves.” Hungry, tired. Hormonal, adolescent, menopausal. How easily we brush them away. Later in the novel, Esther finds herself hemorrhaging, and the male doctors refuse to leave their Sunday country club activities, the fourth “hung up the moment Joan mentioned it was about a period.” Brushed away. Feminine issues that affect an entire half of our population. The person I am seven out of every twenty-eight days.
In the book, that panicky overwhelmed indecision does not permanently disappear with a single hearty meal. It creeps back up to consume Esther’s life. One can only guess something similar occurred within Sylvia Plath’s own life, too. And the results in both are heartbreaking and painful and irreversible. I wonder what life would be like if we gave those “out-of-character” feelings more credit.
When I set about making a cake in tribute to Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar, I also wanted to highlight the beautiful conflict that appears to have existed in Plath herself. She wrote poems full of desperation and hunger and beauty, but she also got excited about learning how to sew clothing for her children. She loved to bake and her favorite cake recipe was one that contained a whole can of tomato soup. Sometimes being a woman feels like we have to choose between feminism and domesticity, but she could have aspirations and achieve great things and make beauty, and still find the time to write out a cake recipe in a letter to her sister-in-law.
I would live a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging banging an affirmation of life out on pianos and ski slopes and in bed in bed in bed.
— Sylvia Plath
The I Am I Am I Am Cake began with the “heavenly sponge cake” recipe typed by Plath, with a little sketch of the tube pan required to bake it, in a letter to Olwyn Hughes (one day I will go to England to see the letter in the British Library).
I top the cake with cream, lightly whipped and scented with fig leaves. Like you’re sitting under the fig tree, too, the sun filtering through the leaves and bringing out that heady, intoxicating scent of coconut and almond and sticky enveloping richness, pondering what each branch represents.
Sylvia Plath’s birthday is October 27. Here in California, at that time of year, fig season has just come to an end. The figs have dropped and withered. But I plan ahead. I gather those figs, I chop them and combine them into a jam, preserving all of those pieces of a life unlived. I save them. Sometimes it feels like I’m saving her.
The cake is named after Esther’s heartbeat. The heartbeat that she feels betrayed by, when she’d like nothing more than to make it stop, but that later becomes proof of her survival. The heartbeat that continues on.
In Watermelon Sugar Cake
In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I’ll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.
In Watermelon Sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I’ll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.
— Richard Brautigan, In Watermelon Sugar
Today I’ll tell you about my In Watermelon Sugar Cake. Because I am here and you are distant.
I am a rather new but devout follower of Richard Brautigan’s. His prose is at once poetic and ridiculous, reverential and satirical. In Watermelon Sugar is a gorgeously dreamy depiction of the way of living and the characters in a commune-like setting, inspired by Brautigan’s time living with such a community in Bolinas. The setting is called iDEATH and I still don’t really know why it’s called this. There are a lot of things about his books that I don’t understand. Maybe one day I will.
In iDEATH, they make their furniture and their windows and their houses out of watermelon sugar. They write their notes with watermelonseed ink, light their lamps with watermelontrout oil. Their fields grow different-colored watermelons based on the day they’re planted. (“Today would be a day of gray watermelons. I like best tomorrow: the black, soundless watermelon days. When you cut them they make no noise, and taste very sweet.”) But it’s also all very relatable. There are romances and friendships. There are outsiders among the band of outsiders, traditions among the non-traditionalists. There are man-eating tigers.
If I’m going to write about this cake, I should also write about me. I read In Watermelon Sugar last summer after coming home from summer camp. Not really a real summer camp, but a sourdough retreat in the Appalachian mountains of Kentucky, put on for folks to come and learn how to make bread. But there were mosquitoes and s’mores and bonding activities, so we called it summer camp. I was a “camp counselor.” We camp counselors joked sometimes that maybe we were doing all this work, making meals and hanging up string lights and prepping for classes, just for us, that maybe there were no guests coming at all.
But guests would come and the camp would take on a life of its own. One day I had a free morning. All the buildings at the place where we held the camp, an old settlement school tucked against Pine Mountain, had funny old names (if you’ve read about what Blooms End is named after, you know I love a good house name). So on this free morning I found myself walking across the grounds, leaving Laurel House where we bunked, and detouring to check in at Plant Center, where camp counselors were leading a lesson in how to process wheat. Guests were sitting on the ground cutting wheat heads off their stalks with plastic craft scissors. I caught snippets of their conversation.
I wandered along towards Far House. The chef for the camp always had creative projects happening throughout the day that would appear tucked into these wonderfully humble meals for the camp guests. That day, and actually for multiple days that week, he had a pot of watermelon juice boiling on the back of the stove. I think later it ended up in a gazpacho, but I really remember watermelon molasses just as a presence on that stove all week.
So when I came home from this scene and read In Watermelon Sugar, I had a very strong frame of reference. I had just lived the life depicted. I lived among the grass and the streams and the collection of characters and the days long and warm and punctuated by meal gatherings. The heady scent of watermelon juice boiling on the stove was still thick in my mind. And so In Watermelon Sugar Cake was born.
A zucchini cake (perhaps a carrot cake would have been more accurate to the book — they end up eating a lot of carrots in iDEATH — but something about zucchini cake just screams summer in a ‘60s commune for me), made with whole wheat or sometimes with buckwheat and brown rice flour, and spiced with coriander and cardamom and cinnamon. Warm spices but warm like sitting on the grass in the golden light of a late summer evening. Cream cheese filling, but lately with the addition of labneh. Watermelon molasses buttercream. Finished with a drip of watermelon molasses and a sprinkling of hempseeds.
This place is not one meant to highlight recipes, but there happens to be a recipe for this one. Star Chefs visited me shortly after returning from my second year as camp counselor at the same sourdough summer camp. I unearthed this recipe. Star Chefs is a little prestigious and I laugh about my little cake among all of the beautifully composed plates on their website. I am a pop-up bakery. That cake slice traveled from my kitchen in Sausalito to my pop-up site in San Francisco and sat for four hours in a cooler while I visited with customers. I placed it on the only plate for eating that I had with me, a cake stand used in my display.
The recipe is hastily written, and even the kind editors at Star Chefs can’t hide my doubt with published recipes that anyone will ever make them (which is why this isn’t a place for recipes). It’s a little vague. There have also been many, many versions of the In Watermelon Sugar Cake, and this is just one. But here it is, In Watermelon Sugar Cake Recipe.
In Watermelon Sugar Cake is about a book, and about an experience. It’s also just a cake. Meant to be eaten and enjoyed. I’ll close with a favorite Brautigan poem.
In A Cafe
I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread
as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking
at the photograph of a dead lover.
— Richard Brautigan, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster
Talk more soon,
Mary
blooms end was always meant to be a story.
The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom
The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom
Rebellious. Living.
Against the Elemental Crush.
A Song of Color
Blooming
For Deserving Eyes.
Blooming Gloriously
For its Self.
Revolutionary Petunia.
— Alice Walker
“Blooms-End” was the name of a house. A fictional house, in Thomas Hardy’s 1878 novel Return of the Native. The name of a house where no one named Bloom lived, but the town knew it as Blooms-End and that was what it remained. The identity of that house existing independent of those residing there.
Similarly, Howards End was the name of a house in Howards End, E.M. Forster’s 1910 novel. There’s a bit where the stodgy old aunt arrives for her first visit and at the train station begins asking after “Howards House.” The porter doesn’t blink an eye and directs her towards Howards End. Where a family called the Wilcoxes live. It all has a touch of the ridiculous to it, doesn’t it?
And from there, the name Blooms End begins to grow in meaning. Links to Molly Bloom, my favorite character in Ulysses (and yes, okay, the lead of Ulysses, Molly’s husband Leopold Bloom), to the Bloomsbury group, a London set of writers and painters and husbands and wives and lovers and friends in the early 1900s who met and shared ideas and supported each other’s work (the dream), to San Francisco candy and restaurant institution Blum’s, which began pre-1906 and continued into the mid-century for ladies to dine in ease and refinement, to treat themselves to a special afternoon.
But the words continue deeper. The end of one’s bloom may be something to grieve, but choosing baking as your form of art, you learn to embrace the ephemeral. That statue may last lifetimes, but a croissant will only wither. Enjoy it now. Or what if the Bloom is a physical flower, growing tall out of the soil. And at the end of that bloom? The earth? Yes, but also an invisible network of roots existing to support that single flower. And you can walk by and enjoy the beauty of that flower. You can eat a slice of Blooms End cake. And you may appreciate it for its flavor and sweetness. Or you’re invited to look deeper for the story that lies below. The care taken to choose each individual ingredient. The inspiration behind the flavor combinations, whether pulled from the books I read or from a memorable time in my life. The person behind its creation, the hands that made it.
I’ve noticed there are two types of customers. There’s the transactional ones, the ones who’d like me to take their money and would like their croissant and they’ll be on their way thank you very much. And there are those who are interested in a dialogue, a conversation. They see the croissants and they see that those are somehow me and they would like to know more. Both are very valid customers. The Revolutionary Petunia blooms for deserving eyes, yes, but also the passer-by cannot be totally prevented from seeing. (Perhaps by seeing it you become deserving?) You don’t need to know every bit of Blooms End lore to taste a croissant and understand that it’s good. There is no password. You’re allowed to call it Howards House (or Bloom’s End), I’ll get it. Because to be honest, a lot of this I do just for me. “Blooming Gloriously For its Self.” But that there exists a group who would like to become part of the story, to contribute by supporting and listening, enjoying and appreciating, now that’s something special, something humbling and beyond my imagination.
That’s what this space, these words, are meant to highlight. The Blooms End.
Talk more soon,
xo Mary