Joanna brought back … some small slices of cake. It was cake with two colours. Half yellow, half chocolate. Mama called it marble cake, but Joanna had some other name for it.
(Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls)
As I wrote in my previous post, I spent many a day in my formative years leafing through my parents’ novels. These books provided me with access to a hitherto largely unknown – and certainly unexperienced – adult world of love, sex, relationships and independent life in big cities that, at that time, I could only dream of inhabiting.
One book that I certainly looked at, but didn’t read until last year, was Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, published, like Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room, in 1960.
Whilst Banks’ novel is strikingly candid in its treatment of topics like sex and unmarried motherhood, O’Brien’s book, whilst less explicit, caused more of a shockwave. Written in late 1950s Catholic Ireland – a country where abortion is still, at the time of writing, illegal; where contraception was only legalized on prescription in 1979; and where homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1993 – The Country Girls, O’Brien’s first novel, was banned by the Irish censor. It is also reported that O’Brien’s family were horrified by the book, and a copy of it was burned by the family’s parish priest.
The novel centres on two ‘country’ girls from the West of Ireland – the naïve and romantic Caithleen, the narrator of the novel, and her more worldly friend, Baba – as they navigate the path to adulthood. Desperate to escape their provincial hometown, the girls get themselves expelled from their convent school by circulating ‘a dirty note’ about one of the nuns, Sister Mary, and the convent chaplain, Father Tom. Once expelled they grab the opportunity for adventure and move to Dublin.
By today’s standards, despite its openness on sexual matters, the novel is actually very tame. Whereas Baba organises ‘double dates’ for Caithleen and herself with middle-aged wealthy business men, Caithleen yearns for ‘young men. Romance. Love and things.’ As she openly admits to herself, all she yearns for is ‘the miracle of a kiss. A kiss. Nothing more. My imagination did not go beyond that. It was afraid to.’ By the end of the novel she is still a virgin, her romantic getaway in Vienna with the married Mr Gentleman being aborted at the last minute.
Caithleen’s innocence is also shown in her response to her arrival in Dublin. Despite her excitement she focuses on the strangeness of the big city with comments like ‘We had never seen so many people in our lives’ and ‘I remember nothing of the streets we drove through. They were all too strange.’ She finds instead a ‘special comfort’ in the familiar sound of the church bells tolling as they make their way to their new lodgings.
And the lodgings will also provide Baba and Caithleen with a new experience – independent life in a boarding house with a landlady ‘a foreigner’.
The landlady, Joanna’s, nationality is never stated, but with a husband called Gustav and the way she litters her speech with the comment ‘Mine Got Almighty’ I would assume she is German. And one of her roles is to provide the girls with abundant supplies of food: ‘cooked ham, some buttered bread, and a small dish of jam’, ‘stuffed tomatoes, sausage rolls, and simnel cake’ and the ‘marble cake’ mentioned above.
Having not made marble cake for years, I leapt at the opportunity to make one again. Caithleen notes that Joanna’s version was ‘Half yellow, half chocolate’. Whilst chocolate is often partnered with vanilla in a marble cake – and I assume that is what the ‘yellow’ refers to – I thought I would try out a chocolate and lemon version, a flavour combination which I really like. I added an extra twist by drizzling both a lemon glaze and melted chocolate over the top, but you could leave that out if you want.
COUNTRY GIRLS’ CHOCOLATE AND LEMON MARBLE CAKE
Ingredients (serves 8-10):
225g butter softened
225g caster sugar
4 eggs
225g self-raising flour
3 tablespoons milk
Grated zest of one lemon and 1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons cocoa powder, mixed to a paste with 3 tablespoons hot water
Icing (optional):
1 tablespoon lemon juice mixed with 5 tablespoons icing sugar
50g dark chocolate, melted in a small bowl over a saucepan of simmering water
Method:
Preheat oven to 180C / 160C fan/ Gas mark 4.
Grease and line a 20cm diameter round cake tin, and preheat the oven to 180C / 160C fan / Gas mark 4.
Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.
Add the eggs one at a time, beating in 1 tablespoon of flour with each egg.
Then fold in remaining flour and the milk to make a soft dropping consistency.
Divide the mixture into two bowls: to one add the lemon zest and juice; to the other the cocoa paste. Stir to thoroughly mix the flavour through the mixture.
Put alternate spoonfuls of the lemon and chocolate mixture into the cake tin. Lightly bang the tin on the kitchen surface to even out the mixture and make sure there are no air gaps on the bottom. Take a skewer and whirl it through the mixture to create a marbled effect.
Bake in the preheated oven for 45-60 minutes until firm and springy to the touch and a skewer or cake tester comes out with only a few crumbs stuck to it.
If you are icing the cake, wait until it is cold. I drizzled the lemon glaze on first, left it to set and then drizzled over the melted chocolate.
