If a woman in a Welty kitchen can honor the long dead through their recipes, she can also expect to defend them through bakeware. The kitchen is where Ellen can become not only a domestic artist, but the family historian, who passes the family recipe to the next generation by enlisting her niece’s help.
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She is the mastermind not only of the cake, but the whole house, family, and future. Welty moves seamlessly between Ellen’s thoughts and actions adding the grated nutmeg and lemon rind, Ellen “diligently assumed happiness,” and separates eggs as she thinks of her hopes for her daughter’s wedding. As Ellen separates the eggs, she lets Laura grind almonds with a mortar and pestle, showing the tradition and attention involved in baking the cake. This cake has one grated coconut, fourteen guinea eggs, a splash of rosewater, the rind of a lemon, one grated nutmeg, and blanched almonds. The cake recipe, passed down from antebellum Mississippi, is the through line to the scene, in which Ellen reflects on her daughter’s upcoming wedding. In the opening chapter of Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, Ellen Fairchild bakes great aunt Mashula’s cake with her nine-year-old niece, Laura. The kitchens of these two Welty novels are hubs of action like the kitchen of my childhood home, where private acts prepared me for the revolutions I inherited as a woman. Two of Welty’s most memorable scenes take place in kitchens: an early scene in Delta Wedding, where an aunt and her motherless niece bake a cake, and the climax of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Optimist’s Daughter, where the protagonist confronts her stepmother over a breadboard that belonged to her mother. This is what I find as well in the pages of one of my favorite writers, Eudora Welty, who raises domestic scenes to an art form. I learned this largely from my mother, grandmother, and aunt, while we stood in the kitchen rolling dough and stirring pots, listening to each other’s voices and telling stories over each other until dinner was ready. Home is where we learned the various intricacies of being a human member of a human family.
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Before women were planning to march on Washington by the millions, our voices were contained in our own homes, gaining traction in quieter moments with family, when we could learn how to express our concerns, our creativity, and our love.