Nana, Mrs. Johnson and chocolate cake

This is, I guess, a kind of belated Mother’s Day edition of Grazing. I got to thinking about it last week, as I was ordering my mom a bunch of spices for baking, and then suddenly Sunday was over and I was halfway through the work week, and here we are. But if there’s one holiday I think deserves an extension, it’s Mother’s Day, and I hope you’ll agree that a belated cake recipe is better than no cake recipe at all.

Kitty Hogan was born two months into a brand-new century in St. Louis, back when it was the fourth-largest city in the entire United States. When she was four, she and her family took the streetcar three miles west from their home on Scott Avenue to see the World’s Fair in Forest Park. They ate ice cream and hamburgers and watched the Olympics, peered into a birdcage bigger than most buildings and squeezed their their eyes closed in giddy fear at the top of the Ferris wheel.

Kitty grew up and got married and moved to the other side of Missouri. She had two baby boys, one of them died, and the other settled back in St. Louis. By 1960, Kitty had six grandchildren, and the third one was my mother.

Like nearly every woman whose DNA is stamped onto mine, Kitty baked, often from memory. Years after she died, her son, my Pawpaw, recreated her recipe for raisin bread, perfecting it over several tries and tastes and wrong turns at his white Formica countertop. Not all of Kitty’s recipes were so mysterious, though; one of her crowd-pleasers was a dense chocolate sheet cake she’d actually taken the time to write down.

When I was growing up, it was the cake we ate on birthdays. It ended up smashed into tablecloths and smeared on chubby cheeks like face paint. Sometimes, my brother and I were allowed to pick the icing: chocolate ganache, or buttercream, or tangy cream cheese. At regular intervals, we begged for this cake — Mrs. Johnson’s cake, our mom called it. We celebrated when the kitchen began to fill with that deep cocoa smell — but we never once asked who Mrs. Johnson might’ve been, or how our great-grandmother might’ve wound up baking her cake.

Kitty Hogan Noonan was the granddaughter of Irish Catholic immigrants. She married the son of an Irish Catholic immigrant, a mail carrier who wrote poems. And like any good Irish Catholic housewife in the 1960s, she loved John Fitzgerald Kennedy. She told her grandkids she’d have voted for the devil on a Democratic ticket, and — speaking of the afterlife — when Kennedy was shot, her affections may have transferred to his Texan successor.

Kitty’s voting record was somewhat notorious among her family, but not enough, I guess, for anyone to put together the pieces when it came to that cake. It wasn’t until the late ’90s, when my mom was paging through a “Good Housekeeping” magazine, that she burst out laughing. There, on the page, was an almost identical recipe to the one for her Nana’s cake, credited to Mrs. Lady Bird Johnson.

mrs. johnson’s cake, circa 1990

Search the internet, and versions of Mrs. Johnson’s cake are everywhere, usually updated to reflect society’s progress away from shortening and a toward a more formal relationship with measurement. Most versions call for you to make the cake in a 15x10 inch pan, so it comes out much thinner than the one I grew up on. Some recommend pecan icing, others call for a dash of cinnamon, and a whole other subset uses cocoa powder and a much higher ratio of fat to everything else. Several, like the “Good Housekeeping” version, are nearly the same as the one in my mom’s recipe box, typed on a sheet of paper that grows yellower by the year. But none are identical, and the reason why has been lost along nearly a century of baking.

In the only pictures I’ve ever seen of Kitty Hogan Noonan, she’s short and blurry, serious in black and white. She might be a woman in an antique-store frame, a ghost. The address where she lived when a fair brought the world to St. Louis is now the entrance to a Residence Inn next to an interstate; the house she moved to after that was razed to build an infamous housing project, which has since been demolished. Now, it’s a field in the middle of what was once a bustling city.

The world gets torn down and built back up again. Recipes are typed. There’s butter at the grocery, an election on the television. A baby is born, and then that baby’s baby. Magazines get shipped off to the presses. But whenever I read about Lyndon Johnson, I crave this cake. Whenever I think about my Irish great-grandmother, I picture the World’s Fair and JFK and imagine how sophisticated she might have felt as she pulled Lady Bird’s cake out of her oven.

Though I love the look of Kitty’s neatly typed recipe, I figured it was worth updating for 2023, with a few tweaked ingredients and a lot more commentary about how to not screw this up. And after perusing the newspapers.com archives and seeing the full scope of Lady Bird cakes, I’ve decided my great-grandmother’s methods with this one were unique enough to give her some credit.

Mrs. Noonan’s chocolate sheet cake

1. Let ¾ cup (1½ sticks/170 grams) of unsalted butter soften at room temperature for some amount of time I can’t specify, since I don’t know how hot and humid it is in your kitchen. You want the butter to be slightly soft, but not mushy.

2. While the butter does its thing, melt 3 ounces of unsweetened chocolate — I like Guittard best, for whatever that’s worth — in a double boiler, if that’s something you own. If, like me, you do not, just put water in a saucepan and stack a smaller saucepan or metal bowl inside of it, then turn on the burner to medium heat, let the water boil and stir the chocolate occasionally while it melts. Once it’s melted, take it off the heat and let it cool.

3. Preheat your oven to 350°F, and grease a 13x9 inch baking dish.

4. By now, the butter may have reached its optimal state of being. If not, wait, and whenever it gets there, cream it in the bowl of a standing mixer with 3 cups (600 grams) of granulated sugar. You’ll want to mix the sugar and butter for about three minutes, increasing the speed from slow to medium as the butter incorporates. Add 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract and 3 eggs, beating enough to incorporate them into the batter.

5. Add the melted chocolate to the egg/butter/sugar mixture, and beat until it’s just incorporated. You want to make sure the chocolate has cooled to room temperature — or at least isn’t hot to the touch — before you add it, so if it’s still too warm, skip to the next step, measure your flour and buttermilk, set it aside and then circle back to the chocolate. I should note here that this is the point at which I like to set the mixer on high and let things really get fluffy and incorporated; once you think you’re good, stop the mixer, scrape the bottom of the bowl and cream it again.

6. Sift together 3 cups (381 grams) of all-purpose flour and 1 teaspoon of kosher salt. Next, pour ¾ cup (6 fluid ounces) of buttermilk into a liquid measure. Add half the flour mixture to the bowl of the mixer and pulse a few times, just to avoid a giant cloud of flour, then beat to just combine. Then, add the liquid and pulse again, unless you want buttermilk in your face. Once it’s incorporated enough, beat the mixture again to just combine, and finally, add the rest of the flour mixture and — you guessed it — pulse, then beat to just combine.

7. Clean out your liquid measuring cup. Use your same saucepan that held your water in the double boiler (or makeshift double boiler), and add about 2 cups of water. Heat it until it’s about to boil, and then pour 1½ cups of hot water into the now-clean liquid measure. Add 1½ teaspoons of baking soda to the water, and pour it into the mixer’s bowl. At this point, I like to do most of the mixing by hand with a spatula; there’s pretty much no way you can run your mixer and not slosh the liquid around at this point. I think you should follow my lead, and once it’s pretty well incorporated, you can slowly pulse the mixer and work up to running it at its lowest speed for about 30 seconds. At this point, you will think you’ve messed up. Your batter will be soupy, you will think that all is lost, and you’ll consider dumping the whole thing in the sink. Don’t!

8. Pour the batter in the baking dish. Place the cake on the middle rack of your oven, and bake it for 35 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean — or nearly clean. The middle of the cake will still wobble ever so slightly.

9. Let the cake cool for at least two hours before slathering it with the icing of your choice. My favorite is a basic cream cheese icing. If that’s the route you want to go, you should soften 1 stick (½ cup or 113 grams) of salted butter and an 8 ounce package of cream cheese while the cake is cooling.

10. When the butter and cream cheese are soft, put them in the bowl of your mixer and go to town; you want to cream them together until they’re homogenous in color and texture. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla extract and keep beating, again until the color is uniform. At this point, start adding powdered sugar, 1 cup at a time, for a total of 4 cups. Don’t add all the powdered sugar at once; you’ll end up covered in it, and if you add it gradually, you can taste it as you go. Maybe you think it’s almost there after 3 cups. Maybe you think it needs to be a bit sweeter after 4 cups. You be the judge.

11. When the cake is cool, ice it and eat it.

a work of art

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