a story about a story about gooey butter cake

I developed a recipe for the quintessentially St. Louis dessert and went way deep on its history in the process.

Lately: I can’t stop reading, and everything I’ve read has been so, so good. I owe you all a books roundup from July, which is coming next week. A spoiler for the August edition: Goodbye, Vitamin, which I read in less than 48 hours this week, is one of my favorite novels in recent memory. I can’t think of a story that made me laugh so hard and then, within a few words, feel so deeply sad. … I’ve placed a couple orders over the past year from Campo Grande, which sells all kinds of cuts of Spanish Iberico pork. I got a box last month, and I think it’s ruined all other pork for me. It almost feels like a different meat than the stuff I buy here in the U.S.

The best kind of journalism tracks an evolution. What is a good story if not a series of snapshots that document change? When I was writing about sports, the change I wrote about was often so, so visible, utterly obvious — but it was still fascinating. Here is Mark McGwire before he used steroids, and here he is after. Here is football a century ago, and here it is today, and how is this the same sport? The same organisms? My favorite stories to write were always the ones that let me dig deep into research, when I could make calls and hear stories about how things used to be, when one person told me one thing and another said the opposite, and it was my job to suss out the truth. I’d burrow a rabbit hole halfway to China, trying to figure out what really happened with the nerds whose computer models powered the BCS or if a kooky former conference executive’s recollections about long-ago realignment were accurate.

I found myself doing the same thing recently, when the Washington Post let me develop a recipe for gooey butter cake, a quintessentially dessert that I’d grown up eating in two different forms: one that looks more like a lemon bar and tastes the way how it would feel to eat your way out of a bag of granulated sugar, and the other that’s more like a gooey, still very sweet, caramelized piece of coffee cake. I knew which version I liked better, but I started my assignment by trying to figure out which version was really, actually gooey butter cake.

I’ll let you read my story to figure out the answer to that question, but I’ll tell you this: The first draft I filed was overly dense with historical nuggets and informed conclusions that I’d found combing Newspapers.com. I cut a tunnel through old recipes published in Midwestern newspapers and ads from 80 years ago for gooey butter cakes selling for pennies. Through those words, I watched the cake’s legend spread on a map, beaming out from St. Louis to parts unknown. I read an origin story for the recipe, and then I read what I guessed to be the origin story for that origin story, and I was in my journalistic element. The ways food has changed and evolved boggle the mind. And recipes are stories, too, told over generations. One person tells it one way and one person tells it another, and now there are two dinners, two cakes, two cocktails. Maybe one is wrong and one is right, or maybe we’re all just eating the way we want to, according to the stories our tastebuds and noses and instincts have been told, over and over again.