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.
— 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