easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy (recipe: lemon-honey polenta cake)

We've had an amazingly warm, bright winter so far. Painfully sunny and temperatures in the upper-50s broken by just a day or two of rain here and there? I'll take it.

Still, I can't help but take advantage of our woodstove, and root vegetables, and pomegranates, and all of my other favorite things about winter. I assume it will start raining in earnest soon enough, so I'm gearing up for it. It seems particularly fortuitous that citrus comes into season during the longest coldest days of winter. Lemons, especially, find their way into almost everything I make when it's dumping buckets.

I've been paging through some enormous tomes about meat, specifically Good Meat and The River Cottage Meat Book. (Many thanks for the suggestions on Facebook!) Both books are amazingly thorough and informative, and I'm relieved to find them at my library as I'm sure I'll return to them again. The books are similar in focus, but I have a slight preference for Good Meat; perhaps because the writer is from the U.S., her recipes appeal to me a bit more than British-style cooking, and her arguments and suggestions in regards to local, sustainable agriculture are more relevant. But both come highly recommended if you are looking for an extensive primer on animal agriculture issues as well as practical information on buying directly from the farmer, often in bulk, and working with lesser-known cuts of meat.

This last is what I was considering as I made this cake. It seems rare that anybody makes a cake from scratch, much less a cake that's a bit different from your standard chocolate or white cake with an inch of buttercream frosting. And I blame cake mixes for this. I realize this makes me sound horribly elitist, but I just don't understand them at all. I seriously doubt we save much time whipping eggs and oil into premixed dry ingredients. It would only add a minute or two to combine our own flour, baking powder, and salt, don't you think? And we'd save money because we wouldn't be paying for advertising, packaging, and marketing in addition to ingredients.

But my primary issue with cake mixes is that, as with so many processed foods, flavor is not particularly relevant because speed and convenience are higher priorities.

How did we decide, collectively, that flavor is not very important? Or that flavor and "hyperpalatability" are interchangeable? Or that time spent in the kitchen is wasted time? Plenty of people point to the exodus of women into the workplace, but this is simplistic (and at it's core a bit misogynistic). It's industrialism in general, I believe, that has created the mystique of convenience. For most of us it's the case that we hand off our lives in repetitive service, and in return we demand some semblance of freedom from labor. What we truly receive is a kind of expensive dependency, in which we don't know how to do the simplest things for ourselves, because we've been trained that they're not worth doing, that some machine or subjugated person can do it for us.

So whether we reclaim some autonomy -- the heart of being sufficient in ourselves -- by building a chicken coop or repairing a toaster or riding a bike to work or, hey, braising oxtail, if we wish to provide for ourselves in any way instead of being a slave, we must cast aside the concept that labor is beneath us. Some labor is defeating, certainly, soul-crushing, even worthless. But not all of it. I've found, in most cases, that whatever time is "freed" by labor-saving devices or persons is subsequently filled by projects and activities that are difficult to defend, whereas labor from which I was formerly "saved" can feel a lot like pleasure -- which is most likely because it's my choice.

There's nothing to be lost by learning to select and cook cheaper, tougher cuts of meat, and then braising them or stewing them long and slow, the old-fashioned way, with intense spices and wines and good fats and crunchy salts, until they fall apart on the fork. That's something I've learned from these two books, which is why I strongly recommend them. When I decided to eat meat I realized how much it dishonors an animal to select only easy, fast cuts while discarding everything that requires time or effort or adventurousness. Maybe it could be said that we dishonor ourselves when we consider only convenience instead of pleasure or thrift.

Certainly there's nothing to be lost by making a cake by hand! especially if we have the opportunity to enjoy something unique. This cake is pretty interesting -- a bit rustic from the polenta, but the crumb is complimented by the soaking of lemon and honey. It's a perfect cake for a light dessert, or with tea.

If you have only coarse-ground polenta, you can whiz it up quickly in a coffee grinder to make it finer. It should be slightly grainier than cornmeal. Cornmeal would be fine, actually, if that's all you have -- the result will be more like cornbread, but still sweet.

 

Lemon-Honey Polenta Cake

1 1/2 c. pastured butter, very soft
1/2 c. local honey, warmed
3 pastured eggs
2 c. almond flour
3/4 c. fine polenta
1 1/2 t. baking powder
zest of 2 lemons

syrup:
1/2 c. local honey
juice of 2 lemons

Preheat the oven to 350F. Beat the honey and butter until smooth and creamy. Beat in the eggs one at a time. In another bowl, combine the flour, polenta, baking powder, and lemon zest. Beat the wet ingredients into the dry without overmixing.

Pour the batter into a greased 9" cast-iron or square pan. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the edges begin to pull away from the pan and the middle is set. Let stand for 20 minutes.

To make the syrup, combine the honey and lemon juice in a small saucepan. Whisk gently over medium heat until the honey is dissolved. Prick the cake several times with a skewer and pour the syrup all over the top of the cake.

Let the cake soak for an hour before slicing. Enjoy at room temperature with a hot cup of tea!