She isn’t measuring, she’s eyeballing, as confident cooks do, and she’s not going to hold your hand as you learn your way around her kitchen. Wilkerson approaches her plot like a mad chef, grabbing ingredients from all over the world, slicing and dicing with abandon, tossing characters and palm fronds and a few drops of rum into a pot and letting it all come to a simmer. One could argue that this isn’t the most original narrative device, but I found it irresistible, right down to the attorney’s unctuous stage-managing of the proceedings. You’ll know when.” She also left a voice recording to be played for her children by her lawyer. Before her own death, she placed a small one in the freezer, along with a note for Benny and Byron: “I want you to sit down together and share the cake when the time is right. That would be - you guessed it - black cake, a “moist, loamy” confection, “essentially a plum pudding handed down to the Caribbeans by colonizers from a cold country.”Įleanor made the cake for Christmas and wedding anniversaries, and even buried her husband with a slice. For Benny and Byron Bennett, adult siblings who have been forcibly reunited by orphanhood, that measuring cup represents all the love their mother, Eleanor, poured into the signature dessert she learned to bake on the island where she grew up. In Charmaine Wilkerson’s sprawling, vibrant, second-chance-celebrating debut novel, BLACK CAKE (Ballantine, 400 pp., $28), a cloudy plastic measuring cup holds more than ounces, cups and milliliters. Some families have crystal and caviar ours has Pyrex and elbow noodles. In my mom’s kitchen, the unsung hero is an ancient mixing bowl - orange on the outside, white on the inside - used to bake five decades’ worth of macaroni and cheese from a recipe perfected by my grandfather. Maybe it’s a humble cast-iron pan, called into omelet service on Saturday mornings, or a pineapple-shaped cutting board inherited from an old roommate who made the best guacamole. In every kitchen, there’s at least one cooking implement that means more to its owners than the food they cook with it.

Black cake author