Cake Special: GBBO and The Lady Baltimore

A special cake entry to mark the climax of the Great British Bake Off – a competitive TV programme that ended last week, with more people watching the final in the UK than watched the soccer World Cup Final. And, it ended perfectly with the lovely Nancy winning, to loud cheers in sitting-rooms all over the land. The programme is in its fifth season, having crept up from a small band of viewers on a lesser channel, to primetime joy and newspaper front pages (the notorious baked Alaska/bingate incident).

This is not the place for a detailed look at the programme (I’m here to look at obscure American novels of the turn of the century) but if you enjoyed Bake Off then I have a top tip for you. A short time ago I went to Simon’s always-excellent Stuck in a book blog, intending to stay for a minute while I checked out a reference. But it turned out that among his very good book reviews, he has been doing weekly roundups about the Bake Off, which are hilariously funny, absolutely spot on, and completely unmissable. I was there for hours. Anyone who enjoyed GBBO should go and look immediately.

Now, back to the book.

The Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister

published 1906

The shutting of a front door across the street almost directly behind me attracted my attention because of its being the first sound that had happened in noiseless, empty High Walk since I had been strolling there; and I turned from the parapet to see that I was no longer the solitary person in the street. Two ladies, one tall and one diminutive, both in black and with long black veils which they had put back from their faces, were evidently coming from a visit. As the tall one bowed to me I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat.

observations: If you heard there was a light American romantic comedy of manners called The Lady Baltimore, you might make some assumptions: that it was set in Baltimore, and/or that Lady Baltimore was a key player. You couldn’t be more wrong – this book is set in post-Civil-War Charleston (disguised as Kings Port) and The Lady Baltimore is a cake:

I returned to the table and she brought me the cake, and I had my first felicitous meeting with Lady Baltimore. Oh, my goodness! Did you ever taste it? It's all soft, and it's in layers, and it has nuts—but I can't write any more about it; my mouth waters too much. Delighted surprise caused me once more to speak aloud, and with my mouth full. "But, dear me, this IS delicious!"

This piece of description crops up wherever the history of the cake is mentioned in the real world - it is a real cake, see above - and I would normally try to avoid it for that reason, but it is just about the only point in the book where the writer says anything about the cake, other than that sometimes the one on sale in the teashop is stale. It seems odd to call your book after a cake, and not say much about it, but there you go. 

The plot is: a young man comes into the teashop to order a wedding cake. This is odd, apparently – men don’t order the wedding cake. This shows there is something wrong with the fiancée, who should be organizing it herself. So there is then a farrago of fortune-hunting, fast girls, a much nicer girl who makes the Lady Baltimore cakes with her own two hands, a boarding house, and people saying ‘the [wedding] cake is not baked yet, we shall see’. There is a very extraordinary climax on a sailboat outing, where one woman (cigarette between her lips, so we know what she’s like) jumps in the river – I had to read this whole section twice because I really didn’t understand what was going on. The bad fiancee is described, wonderfully, as a steel wasp. There is the occasional joke, eg this one about a sick person:

"I should so like to soothe him, if I could," the poetess murmured. "If he were well enough to hear my convention ode—"

"He is not nearly well enough," said Juno.

Unfortunately, just as you are going along with this, thinking that it’s not surprising the book hasn’t really survived – it is very much a look at manners and morals, set maybe around 20 years before it was written - but it’s a bit of a hoot in its long-winded way, we get onto the subject of the aftermath of the war, and the position of coloured people, and the feelings of the defeated South. And there, I’m afraid, the book must completely lose all modern readers with its most discomforting and nasty views on such matters. It’s a pity, because the book does have its moments, and the concept and much of the detail are interesting.

Owen Wister is best known for The Virginian, his 1902 Western novel which was one of the originals of the genre. (In the UK in the 1960s the American TV series based – vaguely – on the book was part of Friday evenings for years and years.) Wister was very successful in his day, and was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt’s. 

Perhaps the contestants on Bake Off next year might make a Lady Baltimore....