In the Night Kitchen

SCALDED and MALTED MILK CAKE

In February 2010 everything went wrong. In the midst of a million other inconveniences and true emergencies, I was laid off from my job as a baker at a small restaurant and suddenly unable to find work anywhere. November to February had flashed by in a frenzy of late-night Thanksgiving and Christmas party orders—hundreds of pumpkin and pecan and apple pies, gift baskets of spicy molasses cookies, and the occasional bûche de Noël, and then, suddenly, silence.

I had clung to my job through a month of post-holiday lull, but eventually I came in to work one day to find a big red slash through my name on the schedule, the eyes of my fellow bakers filled with apology and relief that they had escaped my fate. I tried hard not to take it personally. I was, after all, the most recent hire, so it was only fair that I be cut first. I packed up my tools and folded my apron and walked out of the restaurant’s cozy warmth and into the bracing cold of February in Brooklyn.

Unable to face going home and telling my boyfriend and sister—both of whom were struggling to find work at the time—that I had been laid off, I kept walking. I was certain that in some restaurant somewhere, a baker with a bad attitude had just ripped off her apron and stormed out, vowing never to sift or knead or frost again. I would arrive just in time to save the day, and it would be as if I had never even lost my job at all.

This, of course, didn’t happen. Not even close. Every owner of every restaurant I walked into told me the same thing—that they were already overstaffed, that they also were in the post-holiday lull, that all they needed was the chocolate bread pudding that their chef always made. It was around nine at night when I finally admitted defeat and headed home. Passing by an industrial building a few blocks from my house, I noticed for the first time the smell of yeast and sugar wafting through the warehouse’s open gate. I peered in the windows and saw at least a dozen Hasidic men crouched over enormous sixty-quart mixers and leaning against baking racks, white shirts tucked in over big bellies, tightly curled payot grazing their ears. They talked and laughed and worked, fogging up the windows with steaming loaves of bread.

I considered for half a second that maybe I was hallucinating after walking around all day on an empty stomach, that maybe I was so desperate for a baking job that I had actually just willed this place into being. I marveled that all of this hustle and bustle had been happening nearly every night right under my nose, without my ever knowing it. But what really had me rubbing my eyes in disbelief was the uncanny resemblance this secret place bore to the one in Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen.

My parents often read In the Night Kitchen to me before bed when I was a kid, and I was always fascinated and slightly terrified by it. After they tucked me in, I would stare at the drawings, trying to make sense of them—a scruffy, naked boy falls into a ten-foot-tall bottle of milk and gets stirred into hot cake batter by a group of swarthy chefs, then emerges from a mixing bowl drenched in a cake-batter suit that looks much like Max’s pajamas in Where the Wild Things Are.

In the Night Kitchen features a little boy named Mickey, who dreams that he falls out of bed and into the world of “the night kitchen”—a secret nighttime place where all of the pastries in the world are created while the rest of us sleep. A place like the one I passed by that night and, I’m sure, much like places Sendak himself probably passed many times as a child growing up in a Jewish section of Brooklyn. In the Night Kitchen remains, to this day, one of the most controversial children’s books ever published—it is challenged and banned every year for a variety of reasons. Some critics take offense at Mickey’s seemingly unnecessary nudity, some at the “phallic” milk bottle and the milky substance that makes the boy’s nudity seem less pure. Some even hint at a possible World War II substory, calling attention to the chefs’ “Hitler-esque” mustaches and their attempt to bake Mickey into a cake.

In 2011 I heard an interview with Sendak on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross, in which he talked about a particularly memorable fan letter exchange, and it has stuck with me, tumbling around in my head whenever I feel particularly eager to create a recipe. The fan—a little boy named Jim—sent Sendak a “charming card with a little drawing on it,” so Sendak responded in kind, sending Jim a card with a drawing of a Wild Thing. To this, Sendak got a response from Jim’s mother, telling him: “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” Sendak told Gross, “That to me was one of the highest compliments I ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”

The experience of loving something—particularly a book or a book’s illustration—so much that you actually want to eat it is a sentiment near and dear to my heart. It is essentially what I’m trying to express in this book. Sendak works the idea into Where the Wild Things Are when the Wild Things threaten Max with “Oh please don’t go—we’ll eat you up—we love you so!”

Sendak’s upbringing was not an easy one. Raised in Brooklyn by poor Jewish immigrants, he was a sickly and anxious child, aware from a young age that he was gay. His childhood in the late 1920s and early 1930s was haunted by war, death, economic collapse, and seemingly endless violence against children. The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby was particularly disturbing to young Maurice, and it later factored into a few of his books. His stories are full of nightmares—children are always vulnerable and threatened by danger. Adults are either suffocating his characters with their love or disappearing completely. His characters are obstinate and often downright bratty; they defy their parents’ directions and end up hurtling into danger and adventure, usually to end up—much to everyone’s relief—back in their own beds again.

Growing up, I loved Sendak’s books for this very reason. Parents fear that their children will be shaken up by something they read or see or hear, but these stories—the ones that get your brain working and your heart pumping—are the stories that make you realize the power of the written word, that make you fall in love with reading. They are the ones you remember most vividly, that comfort you when you’re fully grown, roaming the nighttime streets of your neighborhood like one of Sendak’s wandering children, peering in windows, jobless and defeated and scared for a thousand grown-up reasons.

IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN

Scalded and Malted Milk Cake

Serves 8

14 tablespoons (1¾ sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature

¾ cup granulated sugar

¼ cup firmly packed dark brown sugar

1 vanilla bean, seeds scraped out and pod reserved

½ cup whole milk

2 large eggs plus 1 large egg yolk

1½ cups cake flour

¼ cup plus 1 tablespoon malted milk powder

2 teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon kosher salt

Glaze

1½ cups confectioners’ sugar

3 tablespoons vanilla malt powder

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

1½ tablespoons whole milk or heavy cream, or more if needed

⅛ teaspoon kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Spray a Bundt pan thoroughly with nonstick cooking spray. (A 6-cup Bundt pan will yield a taller cake; a 9-cup Bundt pan will yield a shorter cake.)

Combine the butter, both sugars, and the vanilla bean seeds in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment and beat on medium speed until the mixture is light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.

While the butter is being creamed, pour the milk into a heavy-bottomed saucepan and add the vanilla bean pod. Heat the milk over medium heat, whisking constantly, until the milk reaches 180°F. Right before it reaches this temperature, you should see bubbles forming along the pan’s edge and steam rising from the surface of the milk. Once the milk reaches 180°F, remove the pan from the heat and set it aside, leaving the vanilla bean pod in the milk to steep.

Add the eggs and yolk to the butter-sugar mixture, one at a time, beating well after each addition and scraping down the sides of the bowl to make sure everything is combined.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the cake flour, malted milk powder, baking powder, and salt.

Remove the vanilla bean pod from the scalded milk. With the mixer on low, alternate adding the dry ingredients and the scalded milk to the butter mixture until everything is incorporated—be careful not to overmix.

Pour the batter into the greased Bundt pan and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, about 45 minutes.

Cool the cake in the pan on a wire rack for 45 minutes before turning it out onto the rack to cool completely.

Whisk all the glaze ingredients together in a small bowl until smooth. If the glaze is too thick to pour, add another teaspoon of milk or cream. Pour over the cake once it has cooled to room temperature.