12 October and 515 years later, San Salvador and Grand Turk are still squabbling over claiming rights to where those lost Europeans invaders first stumbled ashore in the New World.
Meanwhile, here in Cayman we’re celebrating a happier Heritage event: the accidental discovery of Cayman Heavy Cake, our beloved unofficial National Dessert, by some unknown 19th century cook. He or she may have intended to make sweet cassava porridge and become distracted... and that happy accident proved delicious —and enduring.
Well, that’s speculation, but we should officially declare October 12 “National Heavy Cake Day” and a public holiday. If anything in our culinary heritage deserves the label “born Caymanian,” it’s this heirloom sweet that originated in the Cayman Islands and is found nowhere else— except in some Caymanian kitchens overseas.
Heavy Cake’s importance is historic as well as culinary. It dates back more than a century, a reminder of a time when Caymanian cooks had to be both creative and resourceful with whatever ingredients were on hand. Flour, white sugar, dairy products and even fresh eggs were often either unavailable or expensive luxuries until the mid 20th century.
Heavy Cake remains our favorite birthday cake and is always found on the table at parties, weddings and other important Caymanian celebrations. We would sneak a bite of some kind of Heavy Cake every day if we could—– there are about a dozen varieties. Official recognition of Heavy Cake is long overdue and the timing is critical. There are no public holidays in Cayman between July and mid-November. With the holidays rapidly approaching, we need time to start planning our yuletide Caymanian tables —and traditionally that includes Heavy Cake.
For the benefit of newcomers and readers overseas, let me pause to explain. In spite of its name, Heavy Cake is unlike what’s called “cake” in other cultures. Here in Cayman, our culinary heritage includes two kinds of “cake,” light and heavy.
Caymanian “light cake” is like the cake most people know today. It’s called “light cake” because it’s lighter in texture than Heavy Cake and newer to our cookery, obvious from the ingredients: flour, sugar, shortening and eggs and ingredients like grated coconut or carrots, or mashed ripe bananas and spices. (Chocolate is a recent ingredient here, and not traditional.) It’s baked in round rectangular or Bundt cake pans and sometimes frosted with sugary icing.
Older cooks still know how to make both kinds of cake from breadfruit, pumpkin, pawpaw and even cornmeal (that’s usually called cornbread.) But you can’t make a light cake from grated cassava— or at least I haven’t come across any recipes yet.
Heavy Cake, on the other hand is a dense, often intensely sweet thing whose consistency is so hard to describe that the very name “heavy cake’ could be an adjective. For each recipe, there are as many “secrets” and special touches as there are cooks who still know how to make Heavy Cakes, a traditional favorite that has resisted streamlining by modern conveniences like the microwave. With the exception of blenders and food processors that facilitate making coconut milk, heavy cake remains an all day labor of love in today’s world of instant everything. And Caymanian men make some of the best, including Frank Conolly, who is considered East End’s King of Heavy Cakes.
To start with, Caymanian Heavy Cake is made from coconut milk. Old time cooks insist you must use homemade coconut milk, boiled down slowly until the oil rises to the top. Other common ingredients are brown sugar, margarine, vanilla and spice. While grated cassava is the favorite “starch” or soul of Heavy Cake, we also use other grated tubers like yam, sweet potato or even cocos and Irish potatoes together; dried corn, soaked and grated; fruits like breadfruit, green pawpaw and pumpkin; or cornstarch, cornmeal, cream of what and even biscuits (Jamaican crackers.) The secret to heavy cake involves both the right proportion of ingredients and understanding of the technique, which is almost impossible to capture in words.
So is Heavy Cake’s texture. Some older Caymanians call it “Old Man on a Plate” because cassava heavy cake (still the most common kind) must be firm enough to stand up, but still should jiggle slightly when sliced, as if unsteady on its feet. If you try to eat a piece with your hands, you need to use both—one beneath the “unsteady” part that’s not in your mouth.
While some varieties are a little firmer, the consistency is always slightly sticky, but not gooey like caramel; fudge —but just barely. It holds its shape well enough to eat with your fingers, but is soft enough to melt in your mouth. For American readers, the closest thing I can compare it to is very firm Pecan Pie filling, whose only “crust” is a very thin top layer of lightly caramelized coconut oil and brown sugar.
The origin of Cayman Heavy Cake has me stumped. I’ve searched and researched for months and poured over history books, cook books and passages about the origin of puddings, pones, porridges —even pecan pie, looking for some kind of culinary clue or link leading to its origin. The venerable Oxford Companion to Food devotes almost a page to Cassava, and mentions tapioca; the West African porridge foo-foo and West Indian cassareep and even cassava beer—but nothing resembling Heavy Cake.
Thinking perhaps Heavy Cake’s roots lie in old English steamed puddings, I consulted The Cambridge World History of Food and the scholarly Food and Drink in Britain: From the Stone Age to the 19th Century. Both devote long sections to the origin and importance of steamed puddings in the British Isles, from Pease Pudding and Haggis to Plum Pudding, the ancestor of our fruitcake. It’s stretching the imagination to make a connection between any of these and Heavy Cake.
Nor is there any mention of this confection in the snooty and seriously defective Larousse Gastronomique, which considers itself the Social Register of edibles. Apparently its writers never set fork or foot in the Caribbean while researching this tome. Conch and ackee aren’t even mentioned much less our Heavy Cake.
Curiously, several Southern US cookbooks offered a clue: our Heavy Cake is similar in concept to Sweet Potato Pone, that icon of the traditional Carolina table and African American “Soul Food,” a firm baked pudding made from grated American sweet potatoes. Did this idea come over from Africa?
But in the West Indies where slavery began, its closest culinary cousins are Jamaica’s Cornmeal Pone and Cassava Pone, a favorite old time dish from the Eastern Caribbean south to Barbados and down to Guyana. Cayman Heavy Cake isn’t mentioned in any Caribbean cookbooks I’ve come across. Neither pones nor Heavy Cake merited inclusion in Culinaria: The Caribbean, A Discovery, that oversized tome written a decade ago as “the Encyclopedia of Caribbean cuisines.” In fact, the only “authentic” dessert recipe included in the tiny chapter on “Caymanian cuisine” is blatantly faux local: “Captain Morgan’s Rum Cake.”
Nor is there any mention at all of Heavy Cake or other traditional dishes in Founded Upon the Seas, Cayman’s most comprehensive history book to date. The origin of Heavy Cake remains a mystery as elusive as the ability to make one—for me, anyway. Which leads to a shameful confession: I’ve never been able to make Cayman Heavy Cake.
A few years ago, I sat for hours with Frank Connolly, one of East End’s legendary Heavy Cake makers, trying to understand the process. I wrote down his recipe and instructions as best I could. After that, I should have followed him into his kitchen and watched him make one. When trying to convert “cooking by eye” to a conventional written recipe, something gets lost in translation.
Was it because I took a lazy shortcut and used canned coconut milk?
Was my oven too hot?
Whatever the cause, my own “Heavy Cakes” came out like big flat rectangular brown sugar cassava bricks.
“Oh Thank Goodness!! I’m not the only one!” some are saying right now.
“Thank goodness I have Caymanian friends who will make me one,” I reply.
Now, about today’s celebration and the possibility of a National Heavy Cake Day— I’m afraid that’s just wishful thinking. But maybe Barefoot or Dave Martins could salute our cherished Heavy Cake and capture this slice of Caymanian culture in song. It might begin with “Not a pudding, nor a pone, dis sweet thing is Cayman’s own.” Recipe: Frank Conolly’s Cassava Heavy Cake Many in East End praise Frank’s recipe as the best – “not hard but not too chewy either, and just the right sweetness.” As Frank himself explained, this is another recipe whose primary ingredients aren’t’ even mentioned: patience, and a Caymanian cook’s intuition and ability to “cook by eye.”
“I can’t give you exact times. You have to watch and know when it’s ready at each step. It’s not easy, and it takes a lot of time and practice to learn how to make a heavy cake. You can use canned coconut milk, but homemade coconut milk is best,” Frank said.
6 pounds grated cassava (you can buy it frozen in supermarkets)
3 large dry coconuts
1 gallon water
4 pounds dark brown sugar
1 pound butter or margarine, softened
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons mixed spice (nutmeg and cinnamon)
3 tablespoons cornstarch
3 tablespoons water
3 cups water
If using frozen cassava, make sure it is thawed. Pry the coconut meat from the shell, peel off the brown skin, then cut the white meat into small pieces. Put coconut in blender or food processor and process until fine. Make the coconut milk by combining the meat and 1 gallon water in batches in a blender, blending well, and then straining the mixture through a strainer into a large (8 quart) pot. Throw away the trash –feed it to the chickens if you have them.
Put the pot on to boil and keep coconut milk at a low boil, uncovered, until oil forms on the top, about an hour. Slowly stir in the sugar, and stir until dissolved, then the butter or margarine and mix until all ingredients are blended. Bring the mixture back to a boil, then reduce the heat to a slow, even boil and boil down until thick, about an hour longer. Remove 1 cup of the mixture as basting juice and set aside. Mix the cornstarch and 3 tablespoons water to make a smooth paste and stir into the cassava mixture until thoroughly blended. Add the 3 cups water and blend thoroughly, then add the salt and spice and mix well. Continue boiling the coconut mixture until very thick—this takes about an hour longer. Turn off heat and prepare baking pan.
Preheat oven to 350 and have a large baking pan, 14 x 21 inches waiting. Pour enough of the reserved juice into the bottom of the pan and heat until it turns dark brown and begins to caramelize—about 15 minutes. Do not allow to burn!
Remove pan from oven and pour the cake batter into the pan; bake for 1 hour. Open oven and pull out cake just enough to baste the top generously with some of the reserved coconut mixture. Bake another hour at 350, then baste top again. Reduce heat to 200 and bake 1 hour longer (total baking time is about 3 hours.)
Remove from oven and cool. Do not cover until completely cool and do NOT store in the refrigerator. Heavy cake must be served at room temperature. Cover lightly with wax paper or plastic wrap while cooling to keep flies away. Cover any leftover cake tightly with aluminum and it will keep for a week at room temperature. (Adapted from Miss Cleo’s Cayman Kitchen: Treasured Recipes from East End.)
