Blood Orange Olive Oil Cake

It’s been awhile since I wrote anything literary on here, though it’s not for lack of reading. To say I’ve been reading a lot would be a gross understatement, though it’s not the consuming sort of reading that had my mother lifting books from my hands late at night when I snuck into the bathroom to finish a chapter, the literary devoration that somehow kept me from getting sick in the car, even riding backwards in a bucket seat as my father drove us out to Long Island in 50 mph spurts on the bumper-to-bumper L.I.E, as long as I had a paperback in hand.

Like when I turned writing into a profession and astounded myself when I realized I was too tired to write–or do anything more creative or intellectual than stare at a blank wall for while–turning reading into a degree has proven more difficult than I expected, and as I make notes in the margin of Les Misérables on my way to school every morning, I sometimes remember what it was like when reading was pure leisure, when I could put down a book to pick up another one, not finishing the first for three months or so, a flaneur through the world of fiction.

But every once in awhile, even in this whirlwind semester where I sometimes find myself reading four different books in three different languages at once, I still find moments to take pause:

“Ce n’est pas que je lusse beaucoup,” writes Colette in La Maison de Claudine. “Je lisais et relisais les mêmes. Mais tous m’étaient nécessaires. Leur présence, leur odeur, les lettres de leur titres et le grain de leur cuir.” It reminds me of me in high school, my six-level Ikea bookshelf bulging with titles I picked up at the Strand. “It’s not that I read many. I read and reread the same ones, but I needed them all. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles and the grain of their leather.” Colette reminds me of who I was when I read, like the narrator as a child, for the pleasure of feeling the heft of a tome in my hands.

It doesn’t take much talent, though, to send me back to this point in my life. At 23, I sometimes forget I’m not still 17, and those days in Massachusetts six years ago could have been happening yesterday. It was a Proustian moment, however, when I stumbled upon “Ma mère et les bêtes,” a short story in the same volume, where the same little girl finds herself worrying about her mother’s spider, a spider that sits in the corner of her room spinning a web. Surrounded by dogs, cats, swallows… all she worries about is the spider.

“Porter sans flécher, sur toute gouttelette presque impalpable, l’édifice immense du souvenir.” Proust says that only smell and taste have this power, to “bring you without pointing to each tiny, nearly impalpable drop of the immense structure of memory.” Maybe he’s right; I know it’s often the case, but I can’t explain, then, how quickly I was shot back by this little story, back to when I was 6 or 7, to when my grandmother–a grandmother I generally remember posed in a chair like a doll–clambering over the back of the sofa to catch a giant black fly in a mason jar. I wanted it so badly; she gave it to me, and I carried the jar around like a prized possession until I had to go back to school. I left my fly under the strict watch of my Nana, but when I got home, it had died, and I cried.

It’s a strange memory, one that I didn’t even realize I had. Nana liked to tell us “la vecchiaia è una carogna“–old age is a bitch–but when I remember her like that, it doesn’t even seem like the same person.

Nana was very difficult to buy gifts for, and every year at Christmas, I deliberated carefully over porcelain dishes with a rose–her name–painted on them. In the end, I generally settled for the same gift as every year: a glass jar of farmstand orange marmalade. Her pantry was generally empty–the same container of Tang that my father claimed had been there since the 70s sat at the back of one of the musty shelves every time we visited. But the one thing that Nana really loved was orange marmalade, and so every year, without fail, that was what I gave her.

My Nana died when I was 21, before I had learned to make my own jam. I’m starting to understand how difficult it is to really get to know your grandparents as people when you’re small, and I wish I could have asked her questions about her while she was still alive. As it is, my memories are few and strangely compiled in a surreal sort of collage; I don’t know what is real and what isn’t, and I can hardly imagine what she was like when she was my age, a law student in New York.

I do know that she would like this cake, with sweet and bitter blood oranges baked in and extra virgin olive oil. It keeps extraordinarily well thanks to a syrup you pour over it when it’s done, and as the days continue, the layer of spice comes out more and more. It’s not terribly sweet; she would have liked that too.

Blood Orange Olive Oil Cake (adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

Butter for greasing pan
3 blood oranges
3 clementines or small oranges
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup plain yogurt
3 large eggs
2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
1 3/4 cups  all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. cloves
1 pinch nutmeg

1/4 cup orange juice
1 Tbsp. sugar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan. Grate zest from the oranges and place in a bowl with sugar. Using your fingers, rub ingredients together until orange zest is evenly distributed in sugar.

Supreme all three oranges: Cut off bottom and top so fruit is exposed and orange can stand upright on a cutting board. Cut away peel and pith, following curve of fruit with your knife. Cut orange segments out of their connective membranes and let them fall into a bowl, along with any juices that escape. Repeat with another orange. Break up segments with your fingers to about 1/4-inch pieces.

Strain juice into a measuring cup. Reserve orange segments. Add clementine juice until you reach 1/3 cup of juice. Combine juice, yogurt and sugar/zest mixture. Whisk in eggs and olive oil.

In another bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt and spices. Gently stir dry ingredients into wet ones.

Reserve about 10 of the best-looking and most colorful orange segments. Fold the rest of the orange segments into the batter. Pour batter into prepared pan, and arrange the remaining orange segments on the top.

While the cake bakes, heat the orange juice and sugar in a small saucepan until reduced by about half. Cool the syrup.

Bake cake for 50 to 55 minutes, or until it is golden and a knife inserted into center comes out clean. Cool for five minutes, then unmold upside down. Carefully pour the syrup over the cake, and allow to cool upside down. When cool, turn the cake right-side up and serve.