Minnie's Famous Chocolate Cake

Minnie Custer got herself born on a warm summer day in 1918, just as the Great War was wrapping up after four bloody years, and the Spanish Flu was getting its start in the business of tearing the world a new one.

She was lucky enough to be born into a family untouched by these great evils, however, and she grew up picking tomatoes and collecting eggs on a humble-but-profitable farm in the South. Her maternal grandparents and several aunts and uncles from both sides of the family lived on the property as well, forming the foundation of an excellent village for child-raising. She’d learned to ride from her daddy, and learned to pickle cucumbers from her ma, but it was her grandmother Mama B that taught her how to cook. They’d shuffle around in the kitchen on Sundays, cooking fried chicken, making biscuits, and shucking corn. They’d talk about everything: life, religion, and The Way Things Used To Be. The time Mama B’s pa had had to put down the dog back in ‘74 because it got bit by a rabid fox. The time Indians had raided the barn and stolen all of their horses, and Pa had to sell his gun to feed the kids. The time Pa left to fight the Spanish in ‘98 and never came home again.

One Sunday afternoon, when Minnie was eight, Mama B decided to teach her how to make the famous chocolate cake that always won the blue ribbon at the county fair. It was a family recipe, and involved several secret ingredients. Before she started the lesson, Mama B made Minnie swear that she’d never write the ingredients down on paper, even though swearing was a sin. Mama B couldn’t write, so she’d never had to worry about someone getting hold of the recipe, but she knew Minnie already had a decent grasp of the written word, despite her young age.

After Minnie gave her most solemn affirmation that she would keep the recipe in her head, and her head alone, until it was time to pass it down to her own offspring, the two began to cook. When the cake was finished, it was the best thing Minnie had ever tasted.

Minnie Dacus, formerly Minnie Custer, shuffled around her kitchen, the countertops littered with appliances her Mama B, God rest her soul, never could have imagined.

Minnie had lived a long and happy life. She’d been blessed with six sons, who each had children of their own, and now she was cooking supper for the traditional Sunday family dinner with her eldest granddaughter Ellie. The world they lived in now was entirely alien to the one she had grown up in, but she adapted, as humans always manage to do. Minnie had seen presidents killed, seen man walk on the moon, seen the magical and mysterious World Wide Web come into existence. She hadn’t ridden in a car until she was sixteen, and now her grandkids were getting their driver’s licenses at that age.

She didn’t waste any time pondering these things, though. She spent her time cooking, and praying, and listening to her grandbabies laugh. It had been a few years since she’d made her famous chocolate cake; Mama B had only made it every once in a while, usually on special occasions, and so Minnie had always done it that way too.

As she watched Ellie carefully slice the vegetables for their soup, she decided to finally pass on the recipe she’d held in her head and her heart for so long. She remembered the promise she’d made to Mama B so long ago, before toasters and television and atom bombs, and asked her granddaughter to make the same promise.

“Now I better not get on the computer one day and see my Mama B’s famous recipe posted on the interweb,” she told Ellie. “This here is a family secret. It’s the best chocolate cake there ever was, and only we know how to make it.”

Little Ellie made the promise with reverence in her eyes, and Minnie knew she was ready. The two began to cook, and when it was finished, it was the best thing Ellie had ever tasted.

That night, after Minnie had kissed every member of her family goodbye and given Ellie an especially tight hug, she climbed into her bed that hadn’t been quite warm enough since her husband had passed and turned off her lamp. She closed her eyes with a smile on her face, remembering her Mama B and thinking about Ellie and the rest of her beautiful descendants as she drifted off to sleep, feeling full. She passed on peacefully to Whatever Lies Beyond in the middle of the night, the ghost of a smile still resting on her lips.