THE FAMOUS ORANGE-OLIVE OIL CAKE

THE FAMOUS ORANGE-OLIVE OIL CAKE

I was working as an “Ideas Chef” for the Food Emporium, the A&P’s gourmet branch. My job was an easy and fulfilling one—I cooked a couple of dishes each day, then handed out samples. The stores I worked in were equipped with kitchens in the middle of their floors, places to be onstage while cooking. 
The idea was that store customers could watch the procedure, taste the results, then buy the ingredients at the Food Emporium. However, in my hundreds of hours on that job, I might have had ten people watching and asking questions while I prepped and cooked. Everyone was there later, for the samples.

          I would arrive at 10 a.m. and look at a page containing the two recipes. (I had another hundred copies to hand out to customers.) After checking the fridge and the larder, I would gather the remaining ingredients in the store. Then I would cook up the pair of recipes.

         One day there was a recipe for a dairy-free Orange-Olive Oil cake. It sounded scrumptious, and it reminded me how my immigrant Italian grandma used to make salads: there were always slices of orange and dribbles of olive oil.

         But something was wrong. Was I reading it right? Could even the exclusion of dairy explain it? 
         No way! It was impossible that a regular-size cake could call for a half cup of baking soda and a quarter cup of baking powder! Wasn’t it? So I called Dolores, the head of the Food Emporium's Ideas Chef program. What was going on here?

         “Do you mean the recipe from The New York Times?”

         “The very one,” I said. "It seems they're talking 'teaspoons", not 'cups'!"

         “My god!” she said, “I hope the other twenty-three chefs caught it in time!”

“So do I” I answered. “If they follow the recipe to the letter…well, do you remember the episode of I Love Lucy? The one where the loaf of bread erupts from the oven?”

         She got on the horn, trying to reach the others. And I hand-corrected 100 Xerox copies. In the end, it was a tasty dessert. Only two chefs out of the other 23 had to spend the day cleaning their ovens. 

         And Dolores called the Times. 
         I asked her the next day what their response was.

         “Well, they were…a little cold. It seemed as though…”

         “Insular?”

         “Yeah.”

         “They don’t like to be told they’re wrong.” I told her about a cold shoulder I got when I tried to offer a correction to something printed in their travel section.

         Two years later, while co-copy-editing The New York Times Jewish Food Cookbook for St. Martin's Press, I found the recipe again. It’s a perfect antidote for dull, dairy-free desserts. The problem was, they had ignored Dolores’s call entirely. The recipe still contained the volatile overdose of leavening: "Cups", not teaspoons

         Here’s a chance to earn editorial as well as culinary creds, I thought, and I informed the primary editor of the book at St. Martin’s about the egregious error in a detailed flag on the manuscript page in question. I outlined the experience we'd had at the Food Emporium and again warned the insular cuisine wonks at the Times.
         “You could be liable to law suits” I cautioned them.

         But, alas, apparently the thick-headedness that accompanies the Times’ self-assured departmental insularity is totally impenetrable. A year later the book appeared—with the I Love Lucy recipe still intact.

         Now, I’m no seer, but I would bet the farm that those food editors at the Gray Lady got a new...something...torn for them. I would also guess that, yes, law suits were opened or at least threatened; because the second edition of The New York Times Jewish Food Cookbook came out. It called for ½ teaspoon of baking soda and ¼ teaspoon of baking powder. And it only took those ivy league geniuses five years to figure it out.