Citrus-Scented Wine Cake, or Baking for the Lactose Intolerant

Some of you might remember that a few months back, I quoted a tribute to the classic American butter cake, the truth of which I believed at the time to be self-evident: “When you are thinking of making a cake, a butter cake is likely to come to mind. Butter cakes are part of our past. Our birthday cakes, our wedding cakes, our everyday cakes are butter cakes.”

What, then, is one to do when one wants to produce a triumphant celebration cake but one’s guests suffer from the condition that afflicts some 75% of the world’s population: lactose intolerance? (Can one even call what’s obviously the norm an “affliction”?)

Well, on the one hand, you can go whole-hog (so to speak) and whip up a vegan masterpiece, avoiding not only dairy but eggs into the bargain. Which is precisely what I have done in the past. Now, there’s not a thing in the world wrong with soy milk, almond milk, soy margarine, flax meal, or silken tofu, but somehow they just don’t get my poetico-gastric juices flowing. I can’t conjure up a story for soy milk, no matter how hard I try.

Is that why my Vegan Lemon Cupcakes didn’t appeal? Because my heart wasn’t in the baking? They tasted bright enough but had all the texture of a sodden sponge and they never rose into the gently rounded domes that always make cupcakes look so cheery.

Back to the drawing board. Think poetry, I told myself. Think history. Think cultures that don’t have to search out substitutes for milk and butter because they never relied on dairy in the first place.

And then I thought of the Mediterranean. The land of olive groves and grape vines. Where the grape harvest is celebrated with a cake known as a Schiacciata con l’uva, or Tuscan Grape Harvest Cake. Now we’re talking poetry, history, and a whole lot of culture. 

Traditionally, a schiacciata (which is Italian for “flattened” or “crushed”) con l’uva is baked throughout Tuscany in the fall, when the grapes and olives which comprise its chief ingredients have just been harvested. Sort of like a focaccia, a schiacciata is flat, dimpled, and—in the case of a schiacciata con l’uva—covered with grapes, the juices of which burst joyously forth before being absorbed into the dough, often flavored with rosemary and walnuts. (Keats-lovers will know that I’m thinking of “him whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine”—there’s poetry for you.) 

Delicious, but not desserty enough for my purposes, I thought. And then I came across a recipe for a Citrus-Scented Wine and Olive Oil Cake in a recent issue of Vegetarian Times. It “takes its inspiration,” I read, “from the harvest cakes of Italy and Provence, where grapes and olives grow in abundance.” Instead of grapes, the cake features a sweet dessert wine such as a Marsala or Vin Santo; and instead of rosemary and walnuts, the batter is flavored with orange and lemon zest. Fruity olive oil. Sweet wine. Citrus perfume. What’s not to love?

And so I baked it. It was all I wanted it to be—beautiful, traditional, poetic, and entirely dairy-free. Topped with berries and dusted with sugar, it was also very delicious.

Citrus-Scented Wine Cake with Fresh Berries

2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour

1 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

1/3 cup sweet dessert wine, such as Marsala or Vin Santo

1/3 cup fresh orange juice

1 tsp grated orange zest

1 tsp grated lemon zest

4 large eggs

1 cup sugar

2 tbsp confectioners’ sugar

Fresh berries

-       Preheat oven to 350. Lightly brush a 9” springform pan with oil and line the pan bottom with a circle of parchment paper.

-       Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt. In a separate bowl, whisk together the oil, wine, orange juice, and both zests.

-       Beat eggs and sugar with an electric mixer for 4 minutes, or until very pale yellow and tripled in volume. Add half of the dry ingredients and mix on low speed until blended. Add half of the oil mixtures, and mix to blend. Repeat with remaining dry ingredients & olive oil mixture.

-       Pour the batter into the pan & set on a baking sheet. Bake for 50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out dry. Cool 10 minutes, then remove the sides of the pan & cool completely. Top with berries & dust with sugar (or dust with sugar & serve with berries).

Milk: Why do we love to hate it—and hate to love it?

A short piece for today, this last day of October, and I’ll tell you from the outset that what you’re about to read has very little to do with Halloween. I figure there are already pumpkins enough out there; and besides, I have a great pumpkin recipe I’m going to share with you closer to Thanksgiving—and it’s not for pumpkin pie! But the fact that it's Halloween does me think about children. More specifically, it makes me think about children coming home with candy, way too much candy. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing to do with all that candy is wash it down with a great big glass of milk. Ice cold milk. Straight out of the fridge. What could be better? Well, according to many adults I know, almost anything.

In fact, it’s hard to think of a food that inspires as emotional a response as milk. Drinking a glass of the stuff, that is. Pouring it over a bowl of cereal is fine and adding some to your morning coffee is OK too, but gulping down a glass of it straight out of the fridge? A little iffy. And even if you do indulge in a glass at home now and then—generally with a late-night cookie, a slice of chocolate cake, a piece or two of Halloween candy, or, on the other hand, over a lunch of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—do you order it when you’re dining out on poisson au beurre blanc or pasta puttanesca? My guess is no. Why not? Why is it considered right and proper to order wine or beer or soda or water or even (if you live in the Midwest) coffee with your dinner, but not milk?

Because milk is for babies. They’re the ones for whom it’s produced, after all—nature didn’t intend it to nourish adults, which is why most babies are weaned from their mothers’ breasts about the time they start cutting the teeth that allow them to enter the wonderful world of solid food. Why bother with milk when you’ve got so many more appetizing options? And then there’s the business of lactose intolerance. Mammals generally lose the ability to digest lactose at about the age of two, which is explanation enough of why so many adults gag at the thought of a glass of milk: quite literally, it makes them sick.

 But the more you think about the matter, the more you have to admit that there are a lot of adults who keep drinking milk long after they’ve been weaned from the breast (granted, the milk of other species). They don’t associate milk with infancy; they just like to drink it and they can do so with no ill effect to their digestive systems, no doubt because milk has comprised such a major part of their diet for so many millennia that their physiologies have adapted to it. Who are they? The people who call it milk—or Milch, melk, mjolk—as opposed to the people who call it lait, latte, leche, or lapte. Whereas the milk-drinkers love the stuff, the latte-drinkers find it disgusting. Interesting, huh? People who speak a northern European language like German, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, and, yes, even English drink it, and people who speak a Romance language like French, Italian, Spanish, or Romanian don’t. Who said there’s no connection between the sounds that come out of our mouths and the things that go into them?

How this lacto-linguistic divide came into being is a matter of historical record. When Julius Caesar first stepped foot on northern soil, his astonished comment about the natives was “they live on milk and meat.” We can only imagine how queasy he must have felt: there were actually people who drank milk? But being Roman, he didn’t call it milk; he called it lacte, the beverage that he associated with babies—and with people who were little more than babies, barbarians. No Roman citizen would touch the stuff (except, of course, to transform it into cheese)—and neither did anyone who spoke a language that evolved from Latin. Up north, however, where the stuff was called milk, they saw not a thing wrong with drinking the raw liquid—and so they did. As they do to this day.

But here’s the rub. Even those of us who call it milk and who drink it as adults nonetheless echo Caesar’s disbelief and disdain. Certainly we do in public. Which is why we’re far more likely to drink it in the privacy of our own homes—standing in front of the refrigerator in our pajamas in the middle of the night—than when we’re out and about in the public eye. Don’t believe me? Just try ordering a glass the next time you’re out for dinner and see for yourselves what your friends and relations have to say.

Now, back to Halloween. I wonder if I've got enough candy to hand out tonight. I wonder if I've got enough milk on hand to wash down whatever's left over.