This entry is a reposting of something I had on Facebook that a) I didn't want to lose, and b) feels rather appropriate to this season of family and friends and dark and cold. It is not particularly about music. It's about family, I suppose. Hope you enjoy.
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| A trendy, false treat at my local Duane Reade. |
Red Velvet cake doesn't taste that different than regular cake. What makes it red is an FDA-discouraged amount of a flavorless chemical dye. The frosting is a sweet buttercream, it has some flavor, but it's not so distinct.
My Aunt Catherine made red velvet cake, along with beautiful lemon merengue pie. The frosting was toothpaste white and sweet and sort of crackly and creamy, and the cake was moist and so deeply red, a bit darker than the color of blood. She wasn't really my Aunt, she was something like my great-Aunt's brother in-law's wife. Still, she lived down the road from my grandparents in a little house that her husband built, and after he died, we saw her anytime we were in Pennsylvania, and she came to our house for something like 7 or 8 Christmases. She always spent most of her stay with us doing housework, which she was much better at than conversation; everyone knew not to protest. She was orphaned at a young age, and grew up, I seem to recall being told, in a sanitarium for the mentally ill, where she was never taught to read or write.
I guess coming up on 10 years ago or more, her cakes and pies started tasting funny, and it was shortly thereafter determined that she had dementia; not Alzheimer's, but one of the ones that it takes forever to explain, and then you say 'It's like Alzheimer's.' I was in a lingering bratty phase, convinced that jazz vibraphone and my then-girlfriend were forever, and my family was something of a nuisance to be ridiculed and taken for granted. Aunt Catherine's confused mutterings and frightened looks and shivers were a slightly embarrassing bummer that I 'tolerated' during 'my' Christmas, mostly by avoidance, occasionally showing some compassion or understanding and then all but turning around to take a bow.
Aunt Catherine died a few years after our last Christmas with her, in a facility that probably had some things in common with the one she grew up in, although now she belonged there, I guess. I don't know if they would've made a big deal of Christmas - doubtful anyone in there would know what day it was. (Seems to me the human thing to do would just be to have Christmas every day in those places.). When we cleaned out her house to send her there, we found pictures everywhere of us, from all ages. This woman who wasn't related to me in the slightest and whom I treated as an off-putting obligation at family gatherings put me on her wall, on a side table. Proud of me? Fond of me? Perhaps just wanting something to call family; she'd never had children or even known her parents, but she knew most people had pictures of other people in their houses.
And now she's long gone, and I can't thank her for her red velvet cakes and for caring much more about me than I did about her, and Russell Stover is making this bullshit 'flavor' of seasonal treat because red velvet cake is en vogue with some combination of Yankee foodie hipsters and the human viruses who host shows about cooking fun fare for fatties on the Food Network.
Well, I say you can go to hell, Russell Stover, and I'll see you there.
I tell you who you won't find there is my Aunt Catherine.
