Origin of a Dish: Brooklyn Blackout Cake

blackout2Brooklyn Blackout Cake. Photo courtesy The Way We Ate.

Flipping through my new copy of The Way We Ate: 100 Chefs Celebrate a Century at the American Table, I came across Rachel Wharton’s recipe for Brooklyn Blackout Cake. The book features a century of recipes from some of New York’s most prominent foodies; Rachel Wharton, one of the editors of Edible Manhattan and Brooklyn in one of my favorite people, and Brooklyn Blackout Cake is a double chocolate dessert that has some interesting history, leading all the way back to World War II and the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

During World War II, the Brooklyn Navy Yard was one of the United State’s most important ship building yards. In its heyday, it employed 71,000 workers, including blacks, Hispanics and 5,000 women. They held managerial jobs, made equal pay as white men, and even did the same work–including women welders.

Food in this era was most strongly shaped by rationing and shortages  Owners of local diners had to stand in ration lines for hours to get food for their restaurants, often simply shutting down the business instead of struggling to procure food. Even the Navy Yard commissary had difficulties: fresh fruits were scarce, coffee intake was limited, and luxuries like chocolate were especially hard to find. Sugar was rationed, cacao processing plants lacked labor, and what was produced was mostly sent to the front. Chocolate was a valuable source of energy, as well as comfort, for the soldiers who were fighting.

However, workers in the Navy Yard remember the smell of chocolate wafting over their workplace from Rockwood’s chocolate factory. Founded in 1904,  the company would become the second-largest chocolate producer in the country, ranking only below Hershey’s. The complex on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn converted raw cocoa into treats like Rockwood bits – their answer to Tollhouse Chocolate chips.  They also had major government contracts during the war, and their dependency on these contracts is perhaps why the went out of business in the post-war 1950s. Their factory, marked “Van Glahn Brothers” for the wholesale grocers who originally built it, can be easily seen from the BQE and is now “upscale loft units.”

There was another chocolate confection maker in the Navy Yard area that thrived before and during WW II: Ebinger’s Bakery. The store opened in 1898 on Flushing Ave., just outside of the Yard.  Ebinger’s was part of a tradition of commercial baking in the neighborhood, particularly German bakers. These shops presented an air of authenticity by hiring shop girls with German accents.

Ebinger’s is most reminisced about for its chocolate cake, “with its two layers of moist chocolate cake, soft chocolate cream separating the layers, soft creamy chocolate icing, sprinkled over with crumbs of the chocolate cake itself.(source)” Cake with a crumbled cake topping is very meta. Although this cake was probably first produced in the early 20th century, it got its famous name during World War II.

 “Brooklyn, like the rest of the city, was subject to blackout drills,”  Andrew Gustafson of Turnstile Tours told me. Turnstile offers historic tours of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“In January 1942, a German Uboat even entered New York harbor, saw the lights of Lower Manhattan still ablaze, and used  the city lights to sink two tanker ships in short order. ” Action needed to be taken to protect the American ships entering and leaving the NavyYard.

“The first citywide blackout drills were held in June 1942, and throughout the war, much of the city went through a permanent ‘dimout.’ In Brooklyn specifically, the lights of Coney Island were essentially turned off throughout the war, as they were in Times Square, giving birth to many innovative mechanical signs, like the smoking Camel sign.”

Ebinger’s, being a neighbor of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, decided to name their chocolate-on-chocolate cake after the war-time events: Brooklyn Blackout Cake.

Although Blackout Cake is a beloved New York City- born food, Ebinger’s filed for bankruptcy in the 1960s, and closed for good in 1972. Many feel they were victims of anti-German sentiment during and after WWII. Some fans of the cake bought one before the bakery closed and it kept it in their freezer for a year.

Ever since, it feels like old school New Yorkers have been on a search to find a perfect replica of the Blackout cake. It might be one of those things that only tastes best in memory, but I don’t think it would hurt to give Rachel Wharton’s recipe a try. You can find her recipe here.

Gift Guide: Give an Experience

One of the most useful and memorable gifts I’ve gotten in the past couple years was a knife skills class at the Brooklyn Kitchen. Gifting an experience–learning a new skill, seeing a new place, or consuming something unique–is valuable and long lasting. For a one time payment, your giftee’s life has been improved forever.

Added bonus: they’re a thoughtful last minute gift. Most institutions will email gift cards etc., or let you print them.

Here are two New York institutions I’m a huge fan of that offer gift experiences. They’re also great gifts for friends and family visiting the city. And if you live outside the New York area, then I hope this post inspires you to dig around and see what’s available in your own city.

And I would love it if people shared other food-related gift experiences in NYC and beyond–in the comments below. Let’s all get inspired.

The Brooklyn Brainery

It’s no secret I work closely with the Brooklyn Brainery, so I can attest first hand that this place kicks ass. The Brainery provides low-cost, low-commitment education on just about every topic you can imagine. In the field of food, there are Thai cooking workshops, sushi sessions, and kombucha brewing lessons. But there are also talks on poker, presentation skills and pom poms. An ongoing list of classes is here. Their gift certificates are available in denominations from $10-$5,000,000, so they fit any price range–and even $10 can cover the cost of a class. You can print a hard copy of the gift certificate to give, or select a day to have it emailed to the recipient’s inbox.

And they’ve got their own gift guide of products made by Brainery teachers here.

Turnstile Tours


An interview with Ramonita, proprietress of Ramonita’s Restaurant in the Moore Street Market, one of the stops on Turnstile’s Immigrant Foodways tour.

Walking tours are always a fun gift and I can’t recommend the experience at Turnstile Tours enough. For the New Yorker, take them on the Immigrant Foodways tour, which travels through parts of Williamsburg seldom ventured to by the average resident, including inside the largely Hispanic Moore Street Market. For the out of towner, there are the Food Cart tours, in both Midtown and the  financial district, that not only sample some of the finest fare from around the city, but tell the stories of the vendors. Turnstile is incredibly invested in social justice, so these tours always include a deeper conversation: you’ll get history, contemporary issues, and the narratives of the neighborhood. Gift certificates are available in dollar amounts or for specific tours.

The Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining: How to Make and Drink Whiskey

I am officially a published author!

Although my own book isn’t coming out until 2015, I’ve contributed an essay and a recipe to my buddy Colin at the Kings County Distilling.  He’s got a new book out, The Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining: How to Make and Drink Whiskey, which includes the story of how he got started in the business, how to make your own moonshine, and a host of recipes by “the country’s hottest mixologists and chefs.” I think I probably fit into a third category of “random shut-ins with interesting jobs,” but I think you will enjoy the recipe I contributed for Martha Washington’s Cherry Bounce, a cherry infused whiskey. And I think you will enjoy this book.

Official blurby:

A new generation of urban bootleggers is distilling whiskey at home, and cocktail enthusiasts have embraced the nuances of brown liquors. Written by the founders of Kings County Distillery, New York City’s first distillery since Prohibition, this spirited illustrated book explores America’s age-old love affair with whiskey. It begins with chapters on whiskey’s history and culture from 1640 to today, when the DIY trend and the classic cocktail craze have conspired to make it the next big thing. For those thirsty for practical information, the book next provides a detailed, easy-to-follow guide to safe home distilling, complete with a list of supplies, step-by-step instructions, and helpful pictures, anecdotes, and tips. The final section focuses on the contemporary whiskey scene, featuring a list of microdistillers, cocktail and food recipes from the country’s hottest mixologists and chefs, and an opinionated guide to building your own whiskey collection.

Buy it here: The Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining: How to Make and Drink Whiskey

Honey and Hurricanes: The Lost Bees of New York

honey2Honey from all around New York City.

This article is one of a series I’m writing as a Visiting Artist at BLDG92 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Last fall, a few weeks after Hurricane Sandy, I attended a honey tasting in Brooklyn.  Signs of the hurricane were still everywhere, and it felt nice to be doing something normal.  If attending a honey tasting can be considered normal.

The tasting was hosted by Tim and Shelly, a beekeeping couple; like the honey they produce, their love is strong and sweet. They got married this month, with homemade mead in the wilds of Ohio.

When I arrived at their Brooklyn apartment, there were more beekeepers in the living room than I had met in my entire life. And the honey spread was unmatched by anything on earth.  Six continents were represented in honey samples (all except Antarctica), dozens of countries, and a jar of honey from almost every state in the union. But most incredible was the entire lazy susan devoted to honey exclusively from the five boroughs: Manhattan, The Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.

A change in legislature made beekeeping legal in the city a few years back, although many New Yorkers kept hives illegally for many years before. They dot the roofs of the city, nestle in the back yard,s and in some places, large apiaries have been established, like at The Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“Since I started keeping bees, I feel more connected to my neighborhood,” Shelly told me. “Bees fly up to three miles from their hive searching for food. Now every sidewalk flower I see, I know it’s a part of my honey.”

“But bees are also really lazy,” she added.

Take the infamous Red Hook Red.  In Red Hook, Brooklyn, a mostly industrial (but rapidly changing) neighborhood, there’s a maraschino cherry factory.  It’s cobbled together from a couple mismatched structures like many small factories in the city: as the factory it expanded, it bought several unattached buildings on the same block. As batches of cherries were moved from one space to another, sometimes some of that candy apple-red sugary liquor was spilled and little puddles of cherry syrup were common.

honey3Red Hook Red, made from the blood of maraschino cherries.

A nearby beekeeper pulled out his honeycomb one day to discover hundreds of hexagonal pockets of deep red honey. He was horrified, and puzzled, until the mystery was solved: instead of seeking the nectar of flower blossoms, the bees had discovered a nearby and readily available source of sugar, the maraschino cherry factory.

I always thought Red Hook Red was urban legend.  But there it was, at the tasting, in all its rust-colored glory.  The flavor was not as bad as you would expect, but not like something you’d want to eat again.

“I’ve found pockets of blue, green, orange…” Shelly said about her honeycombs. “They just go to the trash can and sip Gatorade.” The hazards of urban beekeeping.

There were also three jars of honey that were truly special, because they could never be tasted again. They came from Red Hook, the Rockaways, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard: from three hives that were swept into the ocean by Hurricane Sandy.

honey4Honey produced at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, shortly before the hive was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy.

When I sipped these honeys, I thought about how these bees had been connected to my city. This relatively small loss had the power to suddenly make me feel connected to all the much greater losses my city had suffered. And when I think of these sweet little honeys now, I wonder what this hurricane season will bring to the five boroughs.

The Air is Sweet: An Inside Peek at Sweet ‘n Low

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This article is one of a series I’m writing as a Visiting Artist at BLDG92 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

More than 70 years ago, on an unassuming street corner in Brooklyn, a cafeteria operated on the bottom floor of a red brick tenement.  Its location across from the Navy Yard made the diner a great success during the hustle and bustle of World War II, but business started waning as the Yard’s workers were laid off in post-war peace.  The owners, Ben and Betty Eisenstadt were losing money fast; until, as the story goes, Mrs. Eisenstadt got the idea of using a machine designed to fill bags of tea to fill packets of sugar.  No more messy, open bowls on the table; sugar could be sold in individual packets.

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Betty was also a chronic dieter, and the combination of her brains and her waist begat Sweet ‘n Low, the first artificial sweetener marketed as a fat-reducing aid to the general public.  Much more about the fascinating history of Brooklyn’s own Sweet ‘n Low can be found in the book by the same name.  The company, now known as Cumberland Packing, still packs Sweet N’ Low into the bright pink packets on the same corner tenement in Brooklyn; but they’ve also expanded their operations into a massive warehouse on Navy Yard premises. When the Navy Yard was closed as a military base in the 1960s, the area was turned over to industrial development, and Cumberland packing is one of their oldest tenants. I was lucky enough to get a tour of the entire operation.

The very first thing I noticed when I entered the Sweet N’ Low packing facilities was that the AIR TASTED SWEET. You can eat the sweet taste right out of the air; you can lick it from your skin; and eventually, I imagine, you can rub it from your eyes and cough it up from your lungs. It is everywhere–and so is PINK, so much pink! Sweet pinkness everywhere you look.

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The Sweet N’ Low packing plant was on an intimate scale, shorts hallways and narrow stairs winding between converted rooms in the old building; each space has less than a dozen machines each manned by an operator.  We saw a machine that had been working since the 1940s, a twisted mass of steam-punk pipes, levers, cranks and dials that was now used for custom jobs (the packets in the machine on that day were for a 50th wedding anniversary).

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Across the way, inside the Navy Yard, Cumberland owns two more buildings were it processes its other products, including the Sugar in the Raw brand. The turbinado sugar is shipped in from all over the world: on the day I was there, enormous bags arrived from Maui and Columbia.  The sugars aren’t blended when they are packaged; every packet of Sugar in the Raw is “single origin sugar.” Each packet is a taste of Maui, or Columbia, or etc. 

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I also saw immense machines that package their newest low calorie sweeteners, Stevia in the Raw and Monk Fruit in the Raw. Over 3,000 packets whizzed by, the enormous robots manned by a handful of individuals. I asked what the advantage the smaller, human powered machines had over the goliath automated packers–was it more economical for a smaller job?  The answer was no; these employees had been working for Cumberland for 30 or 40 years, and Cumberland refused to downsize their jobs.  They could replace most of their workforce with machines, but don’t out of a sense of responsibility to the community.

While anyone can appreciate Cumberland’s loyalty to its workers, it also made me feel a little funny.  I thought of the twisted mechanics of the 1940s packing machine I had seen, an antique in a factory where super robots process over 3,000 bags a minute. The people here were also antiques: held on to out of devotion and nostalgia rather than efficiency. What does it feel like to work a job where you know you’re not needed?

It made we wonder if there wasn’t a different solution: not to keep these out of date manufacturing jobs in place, but to use that same money to provide the people of the neighborhood with training and education that allows them access to jobs that better use their bodies, minds, and spirits.

But those are just my thoughts as an outside observer.  A huge part of Navy Yard’s goals for the future is to continue to provide employment for the people who live in the neighborhood now, in the face of a rapidly changing city.

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Video: Bourbon Now Made in Brooklyn


I was quoted as an expert in this recent CNN story about the revival of distilleries in Brooklyn.  Looser liquor laws are catching on nationwide, so be one the lookout for a craft distiller opening near you.

I’ve got a teensy segment in this video–don’t blink or you’ll miss me–but featured far more prominently is my buddy Colin down at King’s Country Distillery, making fine whiskeys in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

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