INGREDIENTS
1½ Cups Mayonnaise
2 Cups Sugar
3 Large Eggs
1 Cup Whole Milk
3 Cups All-Purpose Flour
1 Tablespoon Baking Powder
1 Pinch Salt
1 15 oz Can Bartlett Pear Halves
DIRECTIONS
1. Whip together the mayonnaise, sugar, eggs and milk in a large bowl.
2. In a separate bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder and salt.
3. Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients to form a batter.
4. Gently fold in the pears.
5. Pour the batter into a lined 9” by 3” pan.
6. Bake cake at 350°F in the centre of a pre-heated oven until a toothpick comes out clean (50 minutes – 1 hour).
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Angela Hartley (née White). London, England. 27 April 1998
My mother was especially proud of her pear cake. I don’t know where it came from, it wasn’t a family recipe, perhaps she snipped it out of a magazine when she first lived alone. That would have been in Boston. It’s a very American recipe. At least, that’s how I think of it.
She brought the recipe with her to England when she married my father. She’d make the cake every Sunday as a special treat. It was a treat. I never got sick of it. I can still see her in the kitchen, whirling around as she baked. She didn’t set out her ingredients ahead of time. She was constantly going back and forth to cupboards and drawers. Her skirt – one of those full, circle skirts – puffed out and twirled.
She was very beautiful, my mother. I suppose you know that. There are all these pictures of her and my father. People always look at him: the famous one. I don’t suppose they look at her. Her creamy skin. Her dazzling dark eyes. That hair that was as much silver as blonde, tumbling down around her shoulders. She was very pretty.
Anyway, as I say, I can still see her in the kitchen. A serious look on her face as she whipped the wet ingredients together. My mum. I was transfixed by her. I would have been only six years old, but I still remember this.
I found the recipe years later, when going through my father’s things. He’d kept a diary of hers. A fat, leather-bound book with lots of different notes and papers tucked inside.
The diary itself was difficult to read. In fact, I didn’t read it for the first year after my father died. I’d look at it, sitting on top of my bookcase. It was taunting me, daring me to read it. I knew whatever was inside, I wasn’t ready for.
So when I finally started going through it, I went through all the notes and things first. I found the recipe for pear cake written out in my mother’s fluid handwriting, in fading blue ink. I made the cake the very next day. It gave me something to do other than reading the diary.
I know my mother was unhappy. Unhappy with my father. Unhappy with life. Perhaps she was even unhappy with me. She didn’t marry young, you see. Because she was thirty when she met my father, she’d had a life. She’d been single and free to make her own decisions. I don’t know whether she liked much being tied down. Being yoked with this family she hadn’t had before.
I don’t make the cake for my family. There’s something about all that mayonnaise that puts my kids off eating it. But when you wanted things of my mother’s, I knew I couldn’t give you the diary. I thought I could give you this.
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I Jaja 