Attempting an Oral History of Tomato Soup Cake
The grandmother narrative, revisited.
I don’t remember my mother making tomato soup cake—for me it began as a story, not a dish. One more thing to learn about Ruthie, my grandmother, dead well before I showed up. My mother spoke of her often, and in doing so canonized her as a family saint: widowed in her thirties with seven young kids to raise, a set of rabble rousing twins no less, Irish-American, fount of unconditional love, devout Catholic, worked multiple jobs to keep the kids fed, had a laugh you could hear the next town over, she would have eaten you up is how the stories always ended, wistful and decisive. My mother told me Ruthie was watching over us so often that once, on a plane to Disney World, I asked if we’d be able to see her from our seats. Now, we joke about Ruthie in her cloud car, zooming around to keep an eye on us. Ruthie exists, for me, inside and through my mother; storytelling has always been our place of communion.
While Ruthie had kept a notebook of meticulous hand-written recipes, she mostly popped up in the kitchen on St. Patrick’s Day, when my mother forced corned beef and cabbage onto my plate, often supplemented with a chicken breast after I’d eaten the requisite two bites. Aside from that I only remember squelching my hands through ground beef as my mother squeezed in ketchup, explaining the secret recipe in her mother’s meatloaf. Still, somehow, I knew about the tomato soup cake, which was part of Ruthie’s regular dessert rotation. To answer the obvious question, it calls for a whole can of Campbell’s.
In 2014 I was an editor at Food52, where we had a column called “Heirloom Recipes.” Stories of dishes learned at an older relative’s apron strings, an evergreen genre of food media often denigrated thanks to its most saccharine and poorly written examples. I dug up the tomato soup cake thanks to a cookbook my parents had published when they ran a small press in the aughts. Commonwealth Editions published books (mostly nonfiction and coffee table) about New England, and their catalog included a single cookbook: From Apple Pie to Pad Thai, which highlighted recipes and cooks from diasporic communities along Boston’s North Shore1. I wrote a short essay for the column on Ruthie’s tomato soup cake, a piece of writing I now find a bit cringey, but one that I must claim nonetheless. It felt transgressive to publish a cake recipe that called for a hyper-processed can of soup at a workplace so dogmatic about seasonal produce that we often joked snacking on out-of-season GMO grapes could get you in trouble.
I made the cake again last month when Food52 asked if I would participate in a new video series they’re doing with Dan Pelosi, centered around family recipes. I figured tomato soup cake was the perfect thing to make: it sounds like a joke but tastes like a delicate spice cake, moist from the soup and studded with raisins. If you’re feeling ambitious you can top it with a slick of cream cheese frosting. We went all out and layered it, and had a blast. Now everyone knows how tiny my kitchen is!
I have recently developed an interest in oral history, a methodology that has shifted the way I approach interviews. Over the years that I have spent interviewing people for work, I have often felt a nagging discomfort with the position: it’s too easy to feel like you’re imposing on someone, like you have no right to be nosing around in their life. This has a lot to do with my own baggage, but still.
There’s a line that’s been lingering in my head for nine years now, related to all this. In a 2013 Lucky Peach article about the food of Crete, Adam Gollner writes about some otherworldly honey on this Greek Island that most of us will never see. While he is taking notes in his journal, a beekeeper and honey-maker named Manos tells him, “You know, writers are like beekeepers. A writer is the thief of knowledge. And we beekeepers, we are honey stealers.”
A writer is the thief of knowledge. Janet Malcolm offers a harsher proposition in The Journalist and The Murderer. At its yuckiest, writing about someone in a traditional journalistic context can feel extractive: you share your story with me, I pull out a quote or ten that will further or expand my argument, we never speak again. I am the hamburglar, your life the ham. Journalists, myself included, balk when their subjects ask if they’ll be able to see the story before it publishes—no, it’s not what we do, in part because it would upset the power dynamics inherent to the relationship. Oral history, on the other hand, seeks to right that imbalance through a more collaborative approach: here we seek an experience that is generative not just for the interviewer but the narrator, too. In the best case scenario we both learn something through this communal process of witnessing. A transcript becomes a shared and living document, rather than something hidden from the person who provided all the good stuff in there. The term “narrator”, like the methodology itself, recognizes the interviewee as an expert on their own story. It is as much a listening exercise as an interview.
One key aspect of these interviews is the open-ended question: questions that presume nothing, can’t be answered with a yes or no, and ideally get the narrator talking. They’re more prompts than anything else, an invitation to tell a story and reflect on the past. Food makes for an excellent open-ended question: we all eat it, most people enjoy it, and it is a constant throughout family history and personal history. It reflects class, family structure, heritage, migration, personal and community beliefs, quirks, habits, biases: the fascinating mundane stuff that makes up a life. It is an excellent jumping-off point for storytelling—see, as an example, the entire genre of food writing—and for many of us it is the most immediately pleasurable way to commune with our past.
In revisiting the tomato soup cake, I wanted to revisit its story, and conducted an oral history-ish interview with my mother about the cake, about the food of her childhood, about Ruthie. I’ve been trying to understand the theoretical and practical links between recipes and oral history, and I thought this could be a good experiment. Okay my darling, she began, after briefly switching to FaceTime to show me two recent paintings. So let's talk about Ruthie's recipe.
In a workshop I took last winter with Oral History Summer School, our instructor Suzanne Snider said that often, a question is good because it’s easy. While food can of course evoke trauma, displacement, and pain, for many people, tell me what you ate growing up is an easy, even pleasurable question to answer. (At the very least, I knew it would be for my mother.) The writer Alicia Kennedy uses a variation of this question as the opener to every episode of her podcast, and I’ve always thought it a wise one: it immediately tells you a lot about a person, and puts the narrator at ease because they can start somewhere familiar.
My mother started here:
Really my memory is kind of like from seven years old. We always sat down to eat dinner every night. Even when my dad was alive, he’d come home from work. Maybe sometimes they'd have a cocktail together. I really don't know that story—I’ve thought of that. But that tradition of sitting down to dinner started when my dad was alive. And where everyone sat at the table. And saying grace, and Ruthie. What I really remember is Ruthie feeding seven of us. I mean, that was really a big deal. She was a good cook, and it was always meat and potatoes. And fish on Friday.
We didn’t have a lot of money, you know, I mean everyone ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day. That must have been a big responsibility, not just money wise, but also timewise: to cook for seven kids besides herself, and four boys who seemed to have wooden legs, that they could just eat and eat and eat. But I think she liked to cook too.
The tomato soup cake was a real staple for dessert. An all-time favorite that everyone really liked. I'm sure it was a recipe from, probably, the O'Brien family. [Ruthie’s] mom's maiden name was O'Brien, and they were the aunts who kind of doted over her. Her dad died when she was nine and her mom died when she was a teenager. She was the only child, and they all took care of her after her mom and dad died. Who knows, maybe she did the cooking at home. She got older, she never talked about it. So I have no idea.
The topic of food easily led into more general talk of the small cape house my mom grew up in, a mile away from the one she lives in now. Any time I’ve interviewed my mother about the food of her childhood, the death of her father, Gene, frames the answer; she was just seven when he suffered a fatal heart attack. After, there was no Daddy, and there was less money, and all those mouths to feed. My mother’s admiration for Ruthie bleeds through each sentence, a prideful awe at how she managed it. She got the job done, and somehow, sometimes, seemed to enjoy it. When my mother was a teenager, she became interested in cooking, and asked Ruthie if she could use what was in the pantry to make dinner for everyone. Ruthie vetoed the idea; the boys probably wouldn’t eat it, or what if it didn’t come out right, all those ingredients wasted? So she began baking instead. One of my mother’s signature recipes is a pan of boxed brownies, just underbaked and chilled in the fridge until fudgy and transcendent.
“Recipes are narratives with the power of showing how people link their own life memories with specific acts of culinary practice,” writes Razia Parveen in “Food to Remember: Culinary Practice and Diasporic Identity.” The article discusses recipes as “significant conduits of intergenerational cultural transmission between women,” as “collective communal female consciousness”, as “an act of remembering.” I’ve written before about whether or not recipes “count” as a narrative form, but oral history has helped me understand that my own answer is an obvious yes. Especially when spoken orally, as Parveen’s work shows. “Oral history has shown the significance of the personal to these recipes,” she writes, “and how the practical element of each oral text constructs not only a dish and a song, but also nostalgia for an idealised past identity that may never have existed.”
When I first talked to my mother about the tomato soup cake in 2014, she explained that it was a classic Irish immigrant recipe, a way to turn some pantry ingredients (tomato soup, lard, spices, raisins) into a celebration. This time around, I did some additional digging.
The recipe seems to have emerged in the 1920s, and became increasingly popular in the ‘30s and ‘40s when food shortages forced home cooks to become creative with their pantry ingredients. (See also Ritz cracker-based mock apple pie.) One of the first published recipes came from, amazingly, “Marian Manners” in the Los Angeles Times. In her 1942 book How to Cook a Wolf, M.F.K. Fisher wrote of it: “This is a pleasant cake, which keeps well and puzzles people while you are cooking other things, which is always sensible and makes you feel rather noble, in itself a small but valuable pleasure.” Yes!! Campbell’s soon caught on to the trend, and began explicitly marketing it to housewives. Some recipes called it “magic cake.”
In talking to my mother this time around, I began to understand how strongly her family’s Irish-American identity shaped her early worldview. Of course it would shape her understanding of a cake, too. She said:
I think that recipe was from the Irish immigrants—an Irish-American dish, like corned beef and cabbage, ‘cause that’s actually American, Irish-American. And I think the tomato soup cake was something to make from what you had in the cupboard that doesn’t cost too much. The raisins and the spices were the extra attraction. It was always tomato soup cake—you never thought about it, that it was weird. It was just yummy.
I bet a lot of this stuff is from the Depression. You know, they had diddly squat. I remember my dad—if my mom was away, or she was having another kid and she was in the hospital, Dad was in charge, and in the morning we would have mush. Which was basically just graham crackers soaked in milk. But because it was my dad and we would only have it when he made it, it was, Oh, yay! We’re gonna have mush!
Coming from an Irish family, families were really tight. Being Irish, even for me growing up, it was like this big sense of pride. Like, “We are Irish.” You had a lot of big families. My mother was the only child, my dad had nine kids in the family, but the family was it, do you know what I mean?
At the end of the day the family was there, through all the struggles, and it was kind of the rock. And our rock was—it was all of us together and Ruthie at the helm. And it felt really good and it felt secure even amid not really having a lot. I have no idea how she did it all, to feed us. But you know, part of this story is the heritage of being Irish.
Giving food the oral history treatment doesn’t just offer a channel for recipe preservation; it also offers an opportunity to understand what a person, family, or community ate, and more importantly how they ate, the role food played in their houses and their lives. It treats home cooks (and even the people who spent years eating their food) as experts in their own personal culinary traditions. The mush, we learn, has pathos.
As I’ve mentioned, the Grandma Recipe Story has become a cliché. Nostalgia, that oft-mocked and oft-gendered emotional mush, defines the form2. But I’ve come to believe that there’s a holiness in transference. Parveen and many others have written about the role that food plays in the preservation and evolution of diaspora communities, of its ability to connect people to homelands both real and imagined3. This can “foster narratives of continuity that become part of people's lives,” Parveen writes. For me, the thrill is of meeting Ruthie (and Gene too) through these stories, of cooking something she cooked, of finding pockets of intimacy with a ghost.
This was also my first recipe testing experience! The summer before my freshman year of high school I tested a handful of Portuguese recipes, though all I remember is the deep red film of oil that chorizo lent to all those stews.
A quote I love, from Gaby Wilson in SSENSE: “More than a tool for remembering, nostalgia is the ligature connecting an isolated present to a shared past.”
I should note here that there are a number of recent, very good cookbooks—Korean American, Amá, and Chicano Eats, to name three of my favorites—that are, in a way, reclaiming and reviving the Grandma Story (or mother story, etc), showing how cookbooks can be that ligature between present and past.