Sometimes a Great Notion
BLACKBERRY-HAZELNUT COFFEE CAKE
When I met Emily in my junior year of college, I was so fed up and lonesome and exhausted with New York that I had submitted transfer applications to as many schools as I could think of and was weeks away from leaving and never looking back. Meeting Emily changed the course of my life for a million happy reasons—most importantly, she convinced me to stay in New York and, years later, to create the blog that led to this book.
Four years ago, Emily and her husband, Ante, and I started a book club. Every time we finished a book they would come over to my apartment and I would cook them a meal from the book so that we could eat while we were discussing. These book club dinners eventually turned into a literary supper club, which then turned into the blog Yummy Books, which was the starting point for this book. At our final book club meeting we discussed Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion and spooned thick stew over tall, buttery biscuits. Emily and Ante told me stories about Oregon, where they both grew up, and promised that it was just as heavenly as Kesey made it sound (and that they wouldn’t go back for at least a few more years).
Kesey is best known for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but in my opinion Sometimes a Great Notion is his real masterpiece. The novel takes place in the fictional Oregon town of Wakonda and chronicles the lives of the Stamper family—the only nonunion logging family left in the town. When the unionized loggers go on strike to demand more pay (their hours are being cut thanks to the invention of the chain saw), the Stamper family decides to cross the picket line and single-handedly provide the mills with lumber.
The chaos outside the Stamper household is nothing, however, compared to what is going on inside it. Sometimes a Great Notion is a sprawling epic complete with deep-seated brotherly hatred, savage revenge plots, repressed silences, and Oedipal lust. Think Steinbeck’s East of Eden pumped full of testosterone. There is hardly a bleaker, rawer look into family dysfunction and hardheaded stubbornness.
The only moments of relief from the constant stream of heartache and cold, beating rain come when the Stamper family is gathered around the table. The men wake up in the morning to Viv Stamper’s “piles of steaming pancakes.” To the logging mill they take paper sacks filled with vinegar-and-mustard-scented deviled eggs, meaty olives, and “creamy brown candy filled with roasted filberts.”
At dinnertime they are “elbows and ears over a checkered tablecloth” covered with “deer liver and heart fried in onions, and gravy made from the drippings… boiled potatoes and fresh green beans and homemade bread.” Viv prepares baked apples so good—stuffed with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon Red Hots—that Leland Stamper, after eating one, goes outside and literally howls at the moon.
Despite having heard countless tales of how magnificent Oregon is over the years, I was still completely blown away when I visited this past summer to attend Emily and Ante’s wedding. The people in Oregon are friendly and the coffee is strong. People don’t feel the need to tell you what they’re really trying to do while telling you about their bakery job, and there is always the cleanest kiss of a breeze. I thought of Sometimes a Great Notion the whole time I was there, and of my two friends who had no idea what they would become to each other when they sat on my couch four years ago, eating biscuits and bashfully holding hands under a pillow.
Even through the haze of croissants from Ken’s Artisan Bakery and Voodoo Doughnuts and Mirror Pond Pale Ale, I couldn’t get Viv’s “filbert- and blackberry-filled coffee cake” out of my head all week, so the day after the wedding, my feet still sore from dancing (and my head still sore from champagne), I went to the farmers’ market and picked up blackberries and some good Oregon hazelnuts and we feasted on the cake until our stomachs hurt. It was a perfect end to what Leland Stamper would have called the “blessfullest” week.
SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION
Blackberry-Hazelnut Coffee Cake
Serves 8
Blackberry Streusel
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
½ teaspoon kosher salt
6 tablespoons (¾ stick) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into pieces
1¼ cups roasted unsalted hazelnuts, chopped
1½ cups fresh blackberries
Coffee Cake
12 tablespoons (1½ sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1½ cups granulated sugar
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1¼ cups full-fat sour cream
1¼ teaspoons pure vanilla extract
2½ cups cake flour (not self-rising)
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon kosher salt
Make the Streusel:
In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt. Add the butter and, using your fingers, pinch the mixture together until it forms a crumble. Add the hazelnuts and knead everything together until big, buttery crumbs form. Toss in the blackberries and mix around to incorporate them throughout. Cover the bowl of streusel and place it in the refrigerator.
Make the Coffee Cake:
Preheat the oven to 350°F. Butter a 10-inch tube pan with a removable bottom.
In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 5 minutes.
Lower the mixer speed and add the eggs, one at a time, beating between each addition to make sure they are well incorporated. Turn off the mixer and scrape down the sides of the bowl. Turn the mixer back on and beat in the sour cream and vanilla.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add these dry ingredients to the wet and mix just until the batter comes together.
Scrape half of the batter into the tube pan. Spoon half of the blackberry streusel on top in an even layer. Cover this layer with the rest of the batter and spoon the rest of the streusel on top.
Bake until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean, about 1 hour.
Transfer the pan to a wire rack and cool completely. Once it is completely cooled, turn the cake out, remove the removable bottom, and place the cake streusel-side up on a cake stand or plate.