Grandmother's wedding cake

There are periods in our lives when everything happens at once. I see this often among the young families in my neighborhood: they move into a new home, get a new job, have a new baby – all within the space of three or four months.

At age 51, it’s my turn.

I am moving, marrying, renovating a new home and juggling new work. I could be – and sometimes do – feel uprooted with all this change. But my roots, it turns out, run deep.

About three months ago I was surrounded by boxes in the attic, moving out. Time was precious, so I was determined not to give in to nostalgia. For the most part I resisted leafing through old yearbooks and mementos, but on top of one box was a photo album that looked new. Should I set it aside? Or put it with the other photos?

I opened it up. Just to see what was in it.

Out slipped a note from my oldest sister, written nearly 10 years ago on Christmas stationery. Just one page of the album was finished – the note suggested the possibility of filling in the rest over the years.

That one page was enough.

In the center was what appeared to be a wedding invitation: formal, printed script on creamy white stock. But instead of requesting “the honor of your presence…” it described the wedding cake made by my grandmother, Clara Dodd (Myers). Surrounding this was a vintage photograph of her, along with photos of her mother, and her mother’s mother. The script explained that each of them had baked this cake for their weddings, part of a tradition that went back through six generations of women. Under the photos and story were two food-stained index cards recording, in spidery handwriting, the actual recipe. A pint of molasses. A pound of flour.

Apparently, it was my turn.

The cake is a fruitcake, which was traditional for weddings in the 19^th century –this may have been because there was no baking soda then, and with no refrigeration the whisky-soaked cake kept well on a shelf.  Clara Dodd’s mother, Anne Sniffen (Dodd) was born in 1868, and her great great grandmother, who is the first listed as having made the cake, would have lived four generations before, which must have been in the 1700s.

This is a different breed of cake from the brick-hard, brick-heavy holiday punchline. It is rich and moist,  sunny with raisins and sweet with warm, earthy flavor. How do I know?

My daughter, my own Clara Dodd, named for her great grandmother, made it for my wedding.

Clara Dodd Myers, raised five sons and lost one daughter, who was three when she succumbed to one of those diseases now easily cured (was it pneumonia? Whooping cough?). Her husband was a stern patriarch who insisted his boys wear neckties to the dinner table. She must have been the softer of the two parents – her boys, and eventually, their children, called her “Mothe,” short for “Mother” (and pronounced like the first part of that word).

In fact, Mothe did not like her given name, Clara Blanche. She was a tomboy, I’m told, and was called “Bill.” Despite  that fact (and after confirming with my father that my late grandmother would not object), I named my only daughter for her. He nicknamed her “Billy Dodd.”

Mothe was just 5 feet tall, but from the stories I’ve heard, she was a pistol. When her children were still  small, she took a bus across the country, by herself, to visit her brother in the San Juan Islands, writing postcards about her travels and sending her love back to her family in Sea Cliff, on the north shore of Long Island. One story recounts her girlish delight when (and I picture her here as a young bride), she’d purchased a dress and twirled around in it for her husband. He sternly told her to return it to the store, as they couldn’t afford this extravagance. During World War II, she dug up a victory garden in the hard-packed dirt of her back yard; she lived with her mother, her husband and five sons in an old Victorian house with a coal-burning stove in the basement, leaving the bedroom windows open in winter for the fresh air. In summer she trooped the boys down to the beach at Hempstead Harbor, where her youngest would splash within the safety of a playpen, set at the water’s edge with its bottom removed.

My own memories of Mothe are limited: She had a little white dog named Skid Row,  a front porch swing that bumped into the wall of the living room behind it, a gravel driveway that always signaled the end of our family’s long drive to her house. She used a gourd to darn socks, always had a knitting basket nearby, and drank gin and ginger ale with ice cubes that tinkled in her glass.

I was just 5 years old when we sat around the dining room table and my father told us Mothe had died. He gave each of his four daughters a piece of her jewelry. I wore the little clasp bracelet on my wedding day.

And, I also ate her wedding cake. Thank you, sister Jean, for sharing this family history. Thank you my own sweet Clara Dodd, for baking the cake, and carrying it into the seventh generation – I will make it eight at your wedding some day! And thank you, Mothe, for joining us in the celebration, and reminding me: even in the midst of change, I am rooted in tradition.