A Perfect Pound Cake

“…and she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague.” Mark 5: 29

One morning just before Christmas, with food on our minds, I was reading my recipe book, the Bible, looking for mixtures that work. To my encouragement, Carolyn, my wife, was studying up on one of her cook books, looking for the right mixture for a perfect pound cake.

The directions were quite specific: combine eggs, butter, flour and sugar…with a special emphasis on butter and sugar. Put them in a pan, bake at 350 degrees for 60 minutes, and viola, a pound cake. Later, after a trip to Target for a new cake pan, and a couple of trial runs, the mixture worked. Screams of delight echoed in the kitchen as a perfect pound cake emerged from the oven. Of course, perfect pound cakes are not for display, but baked to be eaten.

With tall glasses of cold milk, a frenzied brood attacked like piranhas the perfect product. Perfect pound cakes don’t last very long…but their results do! More gym time. There’s a cost to all things, don’tcha know? Such is the fate of all partakers of perfect pound cakes, and maybe other things as well.

The basic pound cake ingredients are quite simple, really. The real secret is always in the perfect mixture, time and oven heat. It is less a science than an art…and on that day Carolyn perfected the art!

Pound cakes are a tradition in our family. My grandmother, Jewel (she was not so-named for no good reason!), set the standard—no recipe book necessary. She had in her memory the perfect admixture of the ingredients. Not that the family didn’t beg her to reveal the secret. As a lover of crossword puzzles, Carolyn has come dangerously close to figuring it out.

Jewel was a Mystic...they see what we don’t. My mother once asked her to shed a little light on how she’d perfected this recipe. According to my mother, she replied that she actually “saw” the perfect pattern for a pound cake in heaven, and all she did was to follow the directions. She said it was from her study of Plato, who allowed that in heaven there’s a perfect pattern for everything on earth…but that the finished product was never quite perfect because it was made with human hands. Imagine Julia Childs trying to make sense of this notion!

Plato died, and Jewel joined him. Neither revealed their secret of the heavenly pattern or the earthly product. Life has not been the same for our family since! Fortunes have been squandered attempting to replicate the heavenly pound cake template to no avail. Hence the family remains bereft in cash and lacking in consistently perfect pound cakes. We once tried séances held by a carnival grifter from Chicago who passed through town. Chants and invocations fell on deaf ears from this departed duo, and we remain clueless as to their secret.

I had an aunt, RIP, who had done quite a bit of genealogy on our family tree. Apparently she had discovered some of the “missing links” that would connect us more perfectly. She would never pass these secrets on, either. Must run in the family. We all suspected there was some atavistic gene that “her side” passed down to the rest of us that in some way made “our side” less than perfect. But we could never prove it, and she wasn’t giving it up. It caused a mild consternation in the family. Forgiveness is hard in the land of little towns.

I say all this to say this: our recipe for repairing the republic is not working. We’re cookin’ up something that is inedible and the body politic is violently ill from eatin’ it. Not that we’ve ever had a perfect republic, which is impossible, for it’s made by humans. It will never be perfect. Yet the ingredients for something more perfect remain basic and are not secrets. Remember, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union…”?

There are too many cooks in the kitchen. The cooks, crooks, carnival grifters and recipe charlatans are concocting a vile and toxic mixture for our consumption. The label should read, “Prepare to meet thy Maker if you eat this!”

The Bible story of the woman healed of her plague had a simple recipe: there must be Faith in the Petitioner and Virtue in the Healer. I wonder what our citizenry might cook up with this admixture?

A perfect pound cake, or a perfect republic…maybe Jewel and Plato have left us their secret after all. What will we do with it before it’s too late?

Bud Hearn
January 21, 2010