This Impressive Cake Has Many Layers

Credit…Linda Xiao for The New York Times. Food stylist: Sue Li. Prop stylist: Sophia Eleni Pappas.

In 1976, Johnny Cash released a song called “Strawberry Cake.” It was a bit of an outsider tune, not altogether popular. But to me, it falls well within the canon of simple yet great Americana storytelling.

In an interview, Cash talks about walking past a man sleeping on a New York street while on his way to his hotel. He goes on to say that, after seeing a magnificent strawberry cake on a dessert table in the lobby restaurant, he wondered how to help the man spirit away the whole cake, fully frosted, to have for himself.

Recipe: Strawberry Layer Cake

He thinks better of the idea and, instead, writes “Strawberry Cake.” In the song, a man from the street sneaks into the Plaza Hotel, yearns for the cake and, remembering his days picking strawberries in California and his life leading to that moment, grabs the cake and flies out the side door. He outruns the chef and headwaiter and eventually lands in the bushes where no one can find him. He devours the entire cake in rapture, alone, sated and alive. It does not surprise me that Cash, a fellow Southerner and Nashvillian, chose strawberry cake as an antihero’s coveted prize, or that the cake itself is at the center of a personal reckoning about class.

We Southerners love storytelling, and amid the songs, outsider art and poetry that inhabit Americana are recipes, holding narratives that often don’t seem to matter much in the moment but that actually define much of what it means to be alive.