bookcooker: Eggnog Poundcake and Stephen King's 11/22/63

I have not read a Stephen King book since Stand by Me in middle school. I have never read many of the scary books he is most famous for like Salem's Lot, Pet Cemetery, Cujo. Part of the reason for this is that I had nightmares for years as a kid based on the one or two scenes of the movie Salem's Lot I must have caught while my older siblings were watching it - I was convinced there was a kid vampire hanging outside my bedroom window for years... Anyway, as readers of my blog know, I tend to read contemporary literary fiction, and candidly, while I respected his success, I did not consider Stephen King a writer of literary fiction. That perception changed with 11/22/63, a monster of a novel about history and time travel. The book imagines what would happen if someone was able to go back in time and prevent the assassination of JFK. There is no gory horror in this book, but there is a subtle spookiness that is always there, giving the entire novel a sense of uneasiness - this endeavor could all go wrong at any moment, with ramification that we cannot foresee. The novel starts off in Maine, a familiar King stomping ground, with Jake Epping, a middle aged, divorced teacher who seems to be going through his life aimlessly. That all changes when Al, the owner of the diner that Jake frequents shares with him a portal to the past - 1958 to be precise. By simply walking down a set of stairs in the back room of Al's diner, Jake is transported to a sunny afternoon in 1958 and soon is swept up into Al's mission to try to use the time travel portal to change the course of history. All of this seems rather fantastic, but King writes the story in a very matter of fact and detailed way, that to me it all seemed perfectly possible. 11/22/63 is a book you can really sink your teeth into (it weights in at over 800 pages), just like this pound cake, which in the novel served as a romantic euphemism for hanky panky for two of the main characters, which I will explain after the jump.

When I picked up Stephen King's 11/22/63 can be intimidating because it is so long (and heavy!), but once I dove into it, it became one of those books I was sad to finish. The novel is is written with Jake Epping as narrator, telling the story from his perspective as he goes from humdrum English teacher to risky and dangerous time traveler. Jake's narrative style is detailed and conversational, with lots of "if I knew then what I know now" reflections and regrets. King takes an unbelievable story and makes it believable through Jake's narration - we the reader get used to traveling back in time and the realities and implications of that with Jake. When Al tells Jake about the wormhole to 1958 in the back of his diner, he is in the final stages of lung cancer. Jake is the only person he can ask to complete the mission he has failed at - preventing the Kennedy assassination in Dallas in November 1973. King made a smart choice in picking this historical event at the center of his novel - who hasn't wondered about who really killed JFK and how the world may have been different if he hadn't been assassinated (would we have gone into Vietnam? Would MLK have been assassinated? Would we have never heard from Nixon again?) The tantalizing possibilities is what drives the reader through the 800 pages. Jake takes on Al's mission as his own, he has to learn the rules of time travel. Every time Jake returns from the past, the clock is reset, and the past is as it was - and even if he was gone years in the past, in the present he will have only been gone a few minutes. Every thing Jake does in the past will have an effect in the future - the butterfly effect - so he must tread carefully. Jake first goes back to try a right a wrong that happened to one of his adult ed students, a janitor, when he was a kid. This requires Jake to take on a new personality, George Amberson, and to spend time in a hostile, eerie Maine town, and eventually to become a different kind of person - someone who uses guns and plots murders. It is during this first mission that Jake learns how complicated the past can be, and how difficult it is to change the course of history - as Jake repeats often, the past does not want to be changed, it works against him at every turn. Eventually he makes his way to Texas, and spends time scoping out Lee Harvey Oswald and his family in Dallas. Soon he sets up a quiet life for himself in Jodie, a small Texas town, as he bides his time until November 1963. He becomes part of the community and even falls in love, hard, for a woman from the past name Sadie. While Jake/George felt out of place and wary in the past when he was in Maine and Dallas around Oswald and his milieu, in Jodie he becomes comfortable in his shoes and happy - he likes his life in the past better than his life in the present. The parts of the book set in Jodie almost read like Grease - it is a 50's ideal with sock hops and star football players. But Oswald is still out there, and Jake/George will eventually have to find a way to stop him. The novel, after 700 hundred pages or so, speeds to a climactic conclusion - I found myself turning the pages as quickly as possible to find out what happened next - would Jake/George be able to stop Oswald. It's rare to write an 800 page "page turner" but King has done it. 11/22/63 is a deeply satisfying and thought provoking read.

Eggnog Pound Cake, adapted from Dorie Greenspan's basic pound cake recipe
Apart from a great story, King's novel also had a mini recipe book in the back of the book. King thoughtfully included recipes for some of the key food items in the book - Al's famous burger, tuna salad and pound cake, which had special significance to George and Sadie's love story. When they began dating, Sadie was a virgin (even though she was a divorcee) and was embarrassed about sex (and it was 1960, premarital sex was still a no no), so the two of them started use "pound cake" as a euphemism for sex. While King included a traditional recipe for pound cake in the book, I decided to make my own recipe and to make it a little holiday festive by adding some eggnog flavors to it - simply dark rum and nutmeg. This is still a homey, basic cake that is great for snacking with some tea but rich enough to be a special dessert as well.

Ingredients
2 and 1/4 cup cake flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 and 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
4 large eggs, at room temperature
1 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons dark rum

Glaze:
1 cup powdered sugar
1 tablespoon rum
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon nutmeg

Directions:

Preheat oven to 325 degrees and put rack in center of oven. Grease a roughly 9 x 5 inch loaf pan. Put the loaf pan on top of a heavy baking sheet.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt and nutmeg.
In a small bowl or large mixing cup, whisk together the eggs, sour cream, vanilla and rum.
In a standing mixer, cream the butter and sugar together until creamy, about five minutes.
Mix in the egg/sour cream mixture in 3 or 4 additions, scraping down the sides of the bowl in between.
Last, add the flour in 2 or three batches and mix until just combined.
Pour the batter into the loaf pan.
Place the loaf pan, on top of the baking sheet, in the oven and bake until golden and a tester comes out clean, approximately 60 minutes to 75 minutes.
Let the cake cool, in the loaf pan on a rack.
Once it is cooled, take it out of the pan - it should come out easily.
for the glaze, in a small saucepan, combine the powdered sugar, nutmeg, rum and milk and heat over low heat, stirring until the glaze comes together and thickens.
Pour the glaze over the cooled cake, let cool till glaze sets.