Special Sauce with Ed Levine Special Sauce: Artist and Author Maira Kalman on Savoring Moments of Cake [2/2]
In part 2 of the Special Sauce interview with artist and author Maira Kalman, we were joined by Barbara Scott-Goodman, who co-authored Cake, and, of course, we talked cake. What else would we talk about?
The first question I asked was how the book came to be. Scott-Goodman said that she had always wanted to write a book about cake, but not one that dipped into the realm of baking bibles or took itself too seriously. She wanted a book "about moments of cake." And so she approached Kalman (they have known each other for years) and simply said "I want to do a book about cake." And that was that.
Of course, the way the collaboration worked was slightly unorthodox. "That process took a little while to figure out," Scott-Goodman said. "I work as a cookbook writer and think in terms of, 'First we'll do this and that' and when I said something about the yellow pound cake Maira said 'Well, then that would be the picture of Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein.'"
But an unorthodox process was totally appropriate, in light of what they produced. "'Is it a cake book? Is it a memoir?'" Kalman said. "It's both of these things beautifully tied together."
One of my favorite moments of the interview (admittedly one I engineered) was when Kalman read one of my favorite passages from the book: The Cakes of People I Do Not Know
All over the world, all the time, people are eating cake.
They always have and they always will.
A group of children have stopped playing to have cake.
A man taking a nap on a comfortable sofa will wake up to a lovely cake.
Together, or alone, celebrating or sitting quietly and thinking, someone is savoring a moment of cake.
The words on a page don't do this cake poem justice. To really feel the power contained in them you'll just have to listen to the podcast.
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