Photo by Nikki Hansen
Monica O’Connell has done a lot of listening — to Curtis Mayfield songs as a child in her mother’s kitchen; to advice from her culinary heroes like Edna Lewis; and to her heart, when she decided to leave her longtime job in the nonprofit sector to do something completely different.
She was the executive director of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago with a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology from New York University. But after resigning from that position in 2015 to move to Fort Atkinson, where she lives with her husband, O’Connell felt drawn to a different calling. Later that year, she founded Curtis & Cake, her own cake and confection business.
“I always loved baking, cooking and reading about food,” she says, “so I decided to give it a shot.”
O’Connell’s Curtis & Cake is a small-batch cakery based in the Madison area that has all the Southern charm of its founder, who grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
Her voice is as smooth and soft as you’d expect the pillowy cream cheese frosting of her cakes to be. Sugar flowers, fresh blooms and delicate details paint the surfaces of her cakes. They’re a sight to behold — singular works of art. Listening to her talk about the smell of blood orange curd on a sunny morning was like being in her Fort Atkinson kitchen studio with her. Fresh and seasonal ingredients and the connection food allows you to make with others defines O’Connell’s work.
“So much of the emotional motivation behind Curtis & Cake comes from memories I have of coming up as a kid helping my mom prepare for great parties that she threw,” O’Connell says.
Like O’Connell’s mother, other African-American women in the ’60s and ’70s opened up their homes when they often weren’t given the same courtesy. They were the “hostesses of the civil rights movement,” as a Southern Foodways Alliance podcast calls them. They provided the safe, comfortable spaces and home-cooked meals for anyone who needed them. That was their contribution to the movement “at a time when black folks couldn’t stay in hotels or didn’t have the same kind of travel experience that the majority in this country did,” O’Connell says.
Edna Lewis, a chef and author who preserved Southern and African-American cooking and inspired a generation of young black chefs, is someone who instructs and inspires O’Connell in her own work. Lewis championed Southern cuisine and black foodways in a way O’Connell hopes to emulate.
“There’s so much about Southern food and warmth and hospitality that I want to bring into the stuff that I’m doing here,” she says.
To O’Connell, hospitality goes beyond being a good hostess or baking a great cake. Like the business’s namesake Curtis Mayfield — the ’60s and ’70s soul musician who addressed civil rights issues, poverty and drug use facing the African-American community — O’Connell hopes to weave important history into her work. “In a way, it’s deeper than a piece of cake,” she says, “but in a way it’s exactly as simple as that.”
Andrea Behling is managing editor of Madison Magazine.
Read Again https://www.channel3000.com/madison-magazine/dining-and-drink/baker-behind-curtis-cake-gives-meaning-to-a-piece-of-cake/749675360Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Baker behind Curtis & Cake gives meaning to a piece of cake"
Post a Comment