History: Black Cake, A Christmas Treat Emily Dickinson Loved To Bake

Did you know writer Emily Dickinson also liked to bake?  She even had a favorite cake to bake around Christmastime. Recently, the New England Historical Society published an article about her favorite treat to bake, called "Black Cake."  Since yesterday's blog was about baking I did, the blog about "Black Cake" seemed like an appropriate follow-up.   If you give it a try, let me know what you think!

 Black Cake, A Christmas Treat Emily Dickinson Loved To Bake

New England Historical Society, Dec. 7, 2024

If something called a black cake sounds like a perfect Christmas sweet from a famously reclusive poet prone to contemplate death – well, it is.

Emily Dickinson not only wrote stunning poetry, she was a terrific baker. She baked for her family, and often sent cakes and breads to her friends along with odd little notes. She was a private cook who baked as indefatigably as she wrote. And one of the things she baked was a black cake. She developed into an accomplished baker as well as a poet. She wrote some of her poems on kitchen paper and even wrote one on the back of a recipe for coconut cake.

Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson was born into a prominent Amherst, Mass., family on Dec. 10, 1830. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a trustee of Amherst College; her mother, Emily Norcross, was a homebody who spent decades of her life bedridden with chronic illnesses. Emily Dickinson learned to bake bread at the age of 14.

(Image: A retouched daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson. Daguerreotype of the poet Emily Dickinson, taken circa 1848. (Restored version.) From the Todd-Bingham Picture Collection and Family Papers, Yale University Manuscripts & Archives Digital Images Database, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.)

The Black Cake One of the delicacies Emily Dickinson baked was a black cake. It started out in England as a fruitcake or plum cake, cakes made with dried or fresh fruit. As Bruce Kraig explains in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, English women in the early 1800s began to make their plum cakes darker. They did it with treacle, a syrup made during the refining of sugar.

The so-called black cake spread to the British colony of Jamaica, where it got darker and boozier.

American women began to make it too. In 1832, Lydia Maria Child wrote a cookbook recommending using molasses instead of treacle. Click here for the Jamaican version of the recipe, which includes a LOT of rum!