Yesterday, I saw a stack of Gingerbread men kits at Trader Joe’s not even on the 1/2 price shelf, but on a cart to be shipped to where expired G-men go. As late as last week, I had Starbucks holiday gingerbread latte knowing gingerbread’s days were numbered. Or are they?
For the third Christmas [not in a row], I made the Upside-Down Pear Gingerbread Cake. The source of the recipe was Gourmet magazine (February 2002) via Epicurious. I was never happy with the cake, but my family ate it up, so I just made it a once-in-a-blue moon family favorite. The problem for me was always the Bosc pears. This year I decided, at the recommendation of a table guest at Eatonville Restaurant’s Gullah Food & Folklore event, to use red pears. Et voila! What a difference a pear makes.
I took half the cake to Eatonville Restaurant, named for the childhood home of Zora Neale Hurston and setting for her famous novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. This cake has Zora written all over it. In Mules and Men, Zora describes her old cohorts suggesting that she bake a pan of gingerbread before they sit down to telling stories. Zora served gingerbread to her house gusts in Harlem, when money was tight to buy the ingredients for her shrimp and okra according to biographer Valerie Boyd in Wrapped in Rainbows.
In Their Eyes Were Watching God
Oh to be a pear tree–any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world!
The taste test at Eatonville has added a version of the Upside-Down Pear Gingerbread Cake on the menu for the restaurant’s upcoming Food & Folklore event with Hurston’s niece, Lucy Hurston as the special guest host. The date of the event is Sunday, January 23 at 6:30 PM. Eatonville is located at 14th & V Streets in Washington, D.C., the same neighborhood Zora Neale Hurston frequented while a student at Howard University in the 1920s. Food & Folklore has a prix fix menu and reservations are necessary. Go to this link for more information. You’ll see a video of me on the site 
So it looks like gingerbread isn’t going south for the winter. Mmm, Mmm. Kissing bees are singing.
Note: If you make the cake (click on Epicurious link in post), try it warm; or if it’s cooled, warm it in the oven, add a side scoop of cinnamon or vanilla ice cream. Goodbye diet!
