19 eggs, 8 pounds dried fruit, half-pint brandy . . .

Emily Dickinson’s recipe for “black cake”, a dried fruit and brandy concoction that seems scaled to feed a small army, appears in Molly O’Neill’s American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes. Also included in the collection are stories, essays, and recipes from the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alice B. Toklas, Thomas Jefferson, Calvin Trillin, James Beard, and M.F.K. Fisher.

For those who may not have quite so many eggs on hand, there are some scaled-back adaptations of the recipe available. Margery K. Eagan provides one at the Folger Shakespeare Library web site; another comes from Marguerite Krupp at the Walpole Footlighters site. Though not the Herculean undertakings of a 19th century recipe, these still look pretty challenging, though perhaps worth a try the next time you’re looking for some poetry in the kitchen.

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