Not Dottie. She never gave up. She was determined to write so she could earn enough money to buy her family home when her husband resisted.
Dottie’s characters have a way of making readers laugh at how silly relationships are that bind sensible women to husbands and lovers with few redeeming qualities, a full measure of hot air and what we politely call Dick-Do in the South. (This rampant male disease is when one’s stomach extends more than one’s D . . . Do.) Often I wonder if she just took the things she loved about Peter, her husband, and reversed them in her cads.
Her love of food showed in her generosity of entertaining. No one went hungry at a party of Dottie’s, no matter how many people showed up. The first party I attended at her family’s Sullivan’s Island home, the one she purchased from her siblings with money earned with that break-out novel, was a party for SEBA, the South Eastern Bookseller’s Association. Famous writers lined the piazza with the swimming pool in the background, the buffet was plentiful and ongoing, and the caterer exceptional. If the piazza had caved in, as has happened at other parties for more foolish folk who overloaded them, every important Southern author would have been silenced. A clever way to get rid of competition, perhaps, but not Dottie’s style.
The kitchen was the center of her parties and Dottie reigned there, cooking shrimp and grits with her daughter Victoria at her side. A college graduate working for her father, Peter, Victoria’s true ambition was to cook. Whenever I went to New York, I would visit Victoria and we would eat out somewhere and talk about food. One day, Dottie told me Victoria wanted to attend cooking school. Dottie was dubious, perhaps for the same reason my mother was. And I think she wanted Victoria to be able to have her own earning ability, too, if she needed it. It didn’t surprise me Victoria wanted to cook professionally so I made a list of all the jobs available where Victoria could earn her way in the world including personal chef, food writer, food stylist, and restaurant chef as well as many others. I wrote Dottie a letter and enclosed the list. The next thing I knew Victoria was enrolled in Culinary School. Oh, and she met a good guy there.
What surprised me about Dottie’s response was how seriously she took Victoria’s longing for a culinary education, how she considered her approach, the importance for Victoria to have a paying career, and later, her enthusiasm for her daughter’s chosen path. It was perhaps the thing I admired most about her, that ability to reconsider, change one’s mind and enthusiastically support that which she had opposed. Mind you, she kept her eye on the chefs whose kitchens hired Victoria. If a woman could have a character swing an andiron at a faithless husband, imagine what she would do with an iron skillet if someone harmed Victoria.
I encouraged Dottie to add recipes to her novels. I have never forgiven myself for not insisting she let me proofread any recipe she used. She put in her sister’s pound cake. Recipes have a way of dropping ingredients, and slashes for fractions are the very worst, as I know all too well. The final instructions dropped an ingredient much to Dottie’s chagrin and brought her countless reader letters. She never included a recipe in a book again. My hope then was for Victoria to write a cookbook with her mother. And Victoria may do that yet. I’ve included the corrected pound cake recipe here, with hopes her sister will forgive me for the earlier one and her readers will think of her when they bake it.
Lynn Benton Bagnal’s Pound Cake
Dorothea adapted the pound cake recipe of her sister, Lynn, who lives on Edisto Island in South Carolina, for use in Shem Creek. Alas there was a technical glitch so something was not right. Dottie subsequently listed the correct recipe on her website, but not until she bemoaned the mistake to me. Southerners clarify the flour they are using as biscuits are so prevalent many bakers only keep self-rising flour on hand. Lynn, who makes four pound cakes a week, uses salted butter, but the recipe here uses salt and unsalted butter.
POUND CAKE
3 cups plain flour—not self-rising
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks unsalted butter
3 cups sugar
5 large eggs
1 cup heavy whipping cream
2 tablespoons vanilla
Preheat oven to 325° F. Arrange racks to fit tube pan in center of oven.
Generously grease and lightly flour a tube pan.
Sift flour and salt together three times.
Beat butter with sugar until light and fluffy in the bowl of an electric mixer.
Add eggs, one at a time. Beat only until each disappears.
Blend in 1 cup flour followed by ½ cup heavy cream.
Repeat with another cup flour and the rest of the heavy cream. Add remaining flour to begin and end with flour.
Fold in vanilla.
Add batter to pan, level it and rap lightly on the counter to knock out the air bubbles. Place pan in center of the oven and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until it’s browned on top and begins to pull away from the side of the pan. Remove from oven. Wait 10 minutes and invert on a cake plate. Do not cover until cool to touch.
LEMON GLAZE
2 tablespoons cornstarch
⅛ teaspoon salt
¾ cup sugar
⅔ cup water
3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 egg yolk
Lemon rind, finely grated
1 tablespoon butter
Stir cornstarch and salt into sugar.
In heavy pot or double boiler, add water, lemon juice, and egg yolk.
Put over high heat and stir in dry ingredients.
Cook until you see a bubble or it thickens.
Remove from heat, stir in finely grated lemon rind and butter.
Cool and pour over cake.
Dottie hosted sit-down dinners
