We shall have angel-cake again, I promise the children, with the biggest kind of a hole in the middle, giving them a bran muffin to munch meanwhile, and wondering in my heart if this fight for bread will ever end in angel-cake.
One can live on potatoes and bran muffins, although there was never any romance about them, not even during the Great War when Wall Street took them as collateral. We need cake. I don’t remember that I ever lacked potatoes as a child, but, as a child, I do remember dancing while the pickaninnies sang,
“Mammy gwine make some short’nin’, short’nin’,
Mammy gwine make some short’nin’ cake.
Ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’, short’nin’,
Ay lak short’nin’, short’nin’ cake,”
in an ecstasy of pure delight, which was not remotely induced by common hunger.
Short’nin’ cake, angel-cake, floating island, coffee jelly—are they not victuals spirituels, drifted deep with frosting, honeyed over with an amber-beaded sweat, with melting sweetness, insubstantial, impalpable, ethereal, that vanish into the brain, that thrill along the nerves, feeding not the body, not the mind, nor yet the spirit, for these are but three of our four elements—we are also the stuff that dreams are made of, and we cannot wholly subsist on more material fare.
What makes pie pie is its four-and-twenty-blackbirds. Singing-blackbird pie is the only pie, whether you make it of apples or rhubarb or custard or squash, with one crust or two. He dreamed a dream who made the original pie. And even now I cannot pass a baker in apron and paper cap without a sense of frostings and méringues—of the white of life separated from the yolk of life and stirred into a dream. I find the same touch of romance on many faces, both young and old, as I find it over the landscape at dusk and dawn, and on certain days even at high noon.