Nana's Bug Cake

Grandma’s kitchen is a sepia-toned memory of Hoosier cabinets and a glass double boiler, of apple pies fresh out of the oven and fudge cooling in the pan, of the clatter of pint jars and the trill of birdsong through an open window. Grandma's kitchen is spacious and sunlit, with the original oaken cabinets of the depression era affixed with glass knobs and hung with tea towels hand-embroidered in the motif of her choice. Grandma’s kitchen is spotlessly clean but welcoming, with a vast porcelain sink, a dish cloth and a metal pad she refers to as a chore boy, a straw broom and a dustpan standing sentinel in the corner. Grandma’s Kitchen is rich with the blooming smells of roasting turkey, simmering jam, cakes baking, percolating coffee. Grandma’s kitchen is truly the hub of the home, where good food, the making of it and the sharing of it and the sharing of the making of it, meet to make meltingly lovely memories. During this month of remembrance, I devote a column to each of the powerful matriarchal figures from my life, as I honor the profound effect each of these women had on me by recalling their very different kitchens, and by sharing a blue ribbon recipe that was the signature of each kitchen and the woman who inhabited it.

Nana’s kitchen was in a tiny, immaculate home perched on a small cliff overlooking the Susquehanna River. As the pale gray ribbon of the “Susquehanny” undulated in the distance, a gentle breeze brought a hint of waterside air through lace curtains. The drop between the house and the water was steep but safe, as there were wide steppes onto which homes had been placed. Some of them were wide enough for back yards, and Nana had one such, bordered by a fence so that the dog didn’t gambol to the shoreline or the train tracks that ran beside it.

In its heyday, Williamsport had been a steel-gray boom town and a crucial stop on the river trip that started in New York state and terminated as the river emptied into the middle Atlantic basin. Each town along the water way displayed its own personality, but what they had in common was the morose, poetic beauty of the river and the quietude of life in the Pennsylvania mountains. Williamsport was a town of suspension bridges and gabled churches, of painted ladies and row houses, of modesty and goodheartedness.

Nana was part of the fabric of Williamsport her entire life. She recalled town square parades both to send young men to the World War One and to celebrate their victorious return. She recalled the looming iron- and steelwork factories, abandoned and despondent by the time I saw them, as vibrant hubs of activity where an honest day’s work was a promise kept both by employee and employer. She recalled sending her own husband off to World War Two, at the grand train station downtown that had fallen into disuse by the time I saw it, sheltering her own children against the horrors of war and finding a courage in herself to match that her husband was displaying at Normandie. That he returned was, in her mind, a reward for steadfastness and faith. I do believe that, as society changed and one by one those great factories were shuttered, she felt that was a betrayal. One lesson she taught me, in that very kitchen over her inevitable cup of Red Rose tea, was that it is always wrong when doing the right thing is not rewarded, but that so often, that is just exactly what happens.

That mix of practicality, rue and poetry perfectly expresses Nana’s personality. She also had a ribald sense of fun (expressed modestly of course). She loved to play cards and wasn’t above fleecing a greenhorn. She and PopPop liked their beer, which she served on card party night with ham and swiss sandwiches on sturdy brown bread and local favorite Gibbles potato chips. For Christmas, she made an oyster stew I still pine for but whose secrets I have yet to unlock. But among attendees at every Episcopalian fellowship hour and among we who were lucky enough to be called “family,” her most famous dish was bug cake. There was always a baking pan of it on her counter, and none of us who found ourselves in Nana’s spotless, modest kitchen ever failed to help ourselves to a square of Nana’s Bug Cake.

As far as I know, bug cake is called that because a grandkid, upon discovering the raisins lurking within it, thought that the cake had been infiltrated by bugs and said so. I am disinclined to disrespect insects but I am totally inclined to agree with the creepiness of raisins. Nonetheless and however bug cake got its name, this snack cake does have raisins in it, and neither I nor anyone who remembers Nana's Pennsylvania kitchen would have it any other way.

Nana's Bug Cake

1 15-ounce box raisins
1 cup butter, plus more for the pan
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
4-1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 cups boiling water

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
2. Unwrap the butter and place it into a large mixing bowl. Cover the butter gently with its wrapper and set aside to soften.
3. Fill the tea kettle and place it on a burner set to medium-high.
4. Butter a 9 x 12 cake pan. Lightly dust the pan with flour and shake the pan to coat the butter with the flour. Tap the excess flour into the garbage.
5. Empty the box of raisins into a medium mixing bowl. Once the water is boiling, measure out 1/2 cup boiling water. Gently pour the boiling water over the raisins and set aside to plump.
6. Sift the flour, salt and cinnamon together in a medium mixing bowl.
7. Measure out 1 cup hot water from the kettle. Add the baking soda to the hot water, agitate to dissolve the soda in the water. The mixture should bubble.
8. Once the butter is soft enough to work with, measure the sugars into the bowl containing the softened butter. Use a hand mixer to cream the sugars into the butter, until the sugar-butter mixture is light in texture and pale gold in color.
9. Use one hand to steady the mixer as you use the other hand to add the water-soda mixture in a thin stream to the butter mixture.
10. Pour the plumped raisins through a colander and add the plumped, drained raisins to the the batter. Use the mixer to incorporate all of the ingredients.
11. Use one hand to steady the mixer as you use the other hand to add the dry ingredients to the batter. Mix the batter just until combined.
12. Use a silicon spatula to transfer the batter to the prepared cake pan. Smooth the top of the batter with the spatula.
13. Transfer the pan to the oven. Bake the cake 55 minutes. Test for doneness at 55 minutes and if warranted, bake another 5 minutes.
14. Remove the pan from the oven. Allow the cake to cool slightly before serving.