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Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from my Mother's Recipe Box
When Nancy Spiller discovered her late mother’s teaching credential buried in the midst of a long abandoned recipe box, she felt compelled to investigate the lingering mysteries of this troubled woman. Marguerite Lenore Soult had taught for only one year before marrying, having four children and a life surrendered to mental illness, divorce and social withdrawal. Spiller realized that she had probably been her mother’s best and only student in the kitchen they had shared.
Compromise Cake explores Spiller’s life in the suburbs of Northern California in the 1960s, learning to cook by her challenging mother’s side, as remembered through the recipe box’s mid-century and heirloom offerings. It touches on lineage, and industrial changes; it is a meditation on men, women, marriage, community and the nature of compromise.
What emerges is a portrait of a woman whose own desires for a career were tragically stifled by the conventional pressures to be a wife and mother, but found expression through her daughter, an author, artist and teacher. This is a memoir that weds Spiller’s story to the universal of all mothers and daughters, and what, as they say, is baked into the cake.
Compromise Cake explores Spiller’s life in the suburbs of Northern California in the 1960s, learning to cook by her challenging mother’s side, as remembered through the recipe box’s mid-century and heirloom offerings. It touches on lineage, and industrial changes; it is a meditation on men, women, marriage, community and the nature of compromise.
What emerges is a portrait of a woman whose own desires for a career were tragically stifled by the conventional pressures to be a wife and mother, but found expression through her daughter, an author, artist and teacher. This is a memoir that weds Spiller’s story to the universal of all mothers and daughters, and what, as they say, is baked into the cake.
- GenresNonfictionMemoir
160 pages, Hardcover
First published November 12, 2013
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361 people want to read
About the author
Nancy Spiller
4 books10 followersNancy Spiller is a writer and artist living in Los Angeles. A fourth generation Californian and native of the San Francisco Bay Area, she was a staff writer at the San Jose Mercury News and Los Angeles Herald Examiner and editor at the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. Her articles and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, Cooking Light, and Town & Country. She is the author of Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes) and Compromise Cake: Lessons Learned from My Mother's Recipe Box and teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 8, 2018
The author using her mother's recipe box as therapy to work through childhood and adulthood issues is wonderful. I look forward to trying some of the recipes myself -- and even looking at my mother's recipe box again!
May 8, 2015
I thoroughly enjoyed Compromise Cake. I have long been a fan of Nancy Spiller's vivid writing style. "Dark Cake" emerged as a favorite chapter for me - facing her worst fears, wrestling with memories of her mother, and even her use of darkness and light in the chapter's illustration. The book is perfectly structured and paced; I loved that I could see Nancy in the kitchen and hear her voice so clearly throughout. I also especially loved the description of the San Francisco Memorial Tour to mark her mother's 90th birthday, and the touching scene she shared about the last visit with Marguerite, memories well preserved in her recipe box, and even an iPhone. This book is a delightful read.
October 30, 2021
The author uses her mother’s recipe box to try to piece together her past and understand something about her life. She was inspired by finding a teaching certificate, one that her mother only used for a year before having her children. Each chapter focuses on a specific recipe and she looks at not only her own memories, but the time and place surrounding each recipe and how it affected her mother’s life. From Chex Mix to Lemon Chiffon Pie, to the titled Compromise Cake, each recipe brings insight into the life of a troubled woman and her fraught relationship with her daughter and their bittersweet memories.
February 15, 2014
This unusual memoir opens with the author working in her kitchen, rolling out a piecrust for her mother's Lemon Chiffon Pie. In Nancy Spiller's imagination, her mother, Marguerite, is enthusiastically and expertly coaching her in the process, a sweet shared time of mother-daughter exchange. But, in truth...
In 2002, Spiller helped clean out her childhood home when Marguerite needed to be moved to a residential care community. From the pile of possessions on their way to the dump, Spiller rescued her mother's rusted yellow recipe box, the hand-painted flowers still bright despite the passage of decades. The box has resided ever since on Spiller's kitchen counter where, following Marguerite's death in 2007, it was transformed into a conduit to memories of their early lives together. In addition, the "recipe box is not only a portal into my mother, but one into the ancestors I knew little about—my mother was incapable of providing reliable details—and a window to mid-twentieth century marriages."
The first chapter contains the recipe for Lemon Chiffon Pie, with reproductions of the stained index cards on which Marguerite, or a relative or friend, hand-wrote the recipe. Each subsequent chapter contains the cards and recipes for more foodstuffs such as: My Man Cookies, Holiday Scramble (not at all what it sounds like!), Tomali Loaf (an interesting loaf that uses a tomato base), Mother's Famous Clam Chowder, Dark Cake, Persimmon Pudding, Crab Steaks, and several others. Each recipe is wrapped around memories evoked by the author in its respective chapter.
My favorite chapter is Compromise Cake, probably because in our present political climate, I ache for the concept. Interestingly, Spiller sent a copy of the recipe to President Obama, "sympathizing with his plight. I suggested that he serve it at the upcoming Super Committee on Deficit Reduction meeting, organized in an effort to heal the country's widening partisan abyss, one side maintaining a policy against use of the "C" word. 'You might even wait until they've enjoyed a piece or two before you tell them what it's called,' I suggested. 'then see if anyone chokes!' I did not receive a response and the committee failed to meet its goals. I rest my case."
Recipes aside, Spiller's book reached deeply into my senses, always one of my higher criteria for a good read. Enjoy!
by Mary Jo Doig
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
We didn't have many satisfying "mother-daughter" talks when she was alive. I usually felt I was the mother, lashed with the need to understand a withdrawn, recalcitrant, unhappy daughter. My job, like that of any concerned parent, was to try to figure out what my coy, puzzling, enigmatic, fey, angry, teasing, infuriating daughter meant in any given moment. My hope was to help her become the palpable parent, available and appropriately concerned about my childish needs.
But that wasn't meant to be.
In 2002, Spiller helped clean out her childhood home when Marguerite needed to be moved to a residential care community. From the pile of possessions on their way to the dump, Spiller rescued her mother's rusted yellow recipe box, the hand-painted flowers still bright despite the passage of decades. The box has resided ever since on Spiller's kitchen counter where, following Marguerite's death in 2007, it was transformed into a conduit to memories of their early lives together. In addition, the "recipe box is not only a portal into my mother, but one into the ancestors I knew little about—my mother was incapable of providing reliable details—and a window to mid-twentieth century marriages."
The first chapter contains the recipe for Lemon Chiffon Pie, with reproductions of the stained index cards on which Marguerite, or a relative or friend, hand-wrote the recipe. Each subsequent chapter contains the cards and recipes for more foodstuffs such as: My Man Cookies, Holiday Scramble (not at all what it sounds like!), Tomali Loaf (an interesting loaf that uses a tomato base), Mother's Famous Clam Chowder, Dark Cake, Persimmon Pudding, Crab Steaks, and several others. Each recipe is wrapped around memories evoked by the author in its respective chapter.
My favorite chapter is Compromise Cake, probably because in our present political climate, I ache for the concept. Interestingly, Spiller sent a copy of the recipe to President Obama, "sympathizing with his plight. I suggested that he serve it at the upcoming Super Committee on Deficit Reduction meeting, organized in an effort to heal the country's widening partisan abyss, one side maintaining a policy against use of the "C" word. 'You might even wait until they've enjoyed a piece or two before you tell them what it's called,' I suggested. 'then see if anyone chokes!' I did not receive a response and the committee failed to meet its goals. I rest my case."
Recipes aside, Spiller's book reached deeply into my senses, always one of my higher criteria for a good read. Enjoy!
by Mary Jo Doig
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
December 29, 2013
No matter who you are, everyone has a story. For the ones whose voices seem silent, it usually takes the end of their life for their story to be told. For so many mothers and daughters, the kitchen has been the blank canvas which the greatest masterpieces have been created. Memories made, traditions passed along, and lessons of life sifted together to form the perfect ingredients. Through such a beautiful memoir, Nancy Spiller takes the reader on a journey through her mother’s old recipe box to recreate the memories of their lives and ones created through their lineages that will inspire nostalgia for so many who have shared the same connection.
What was so special about this book was that from the beginning, you are invited in the kitchen for this shared journey. It is all too often that once a loved one passes that we come upon something that intrigues us about their life to learn more or drifts our mind to remember when. For so many like her mother who represent a time when the pressures of being a wife and mother dominated their own desires, it was the kitchen where they poured their hearts into. As for so many, the recipe box was much more than just a box with recipes in it. It represented the special moments no matter what life was like beyond those four walls the greatest memories and the best lessons our life were learned.
Whether this book represents her life or yours, the sentimental nostalgia is interchangeable. It’s books like this that make you want to go back in time and remember the familiar aromas of the simple but special times that brought the best out of life. This book not only was just filled with her story but we learned about the times that it represented as well as experiencing with her recreate those recipes as if her mother was beside her. Each chapter featured a dish that gave the reader new ingredients of her life that were made. The recipes that made the box weren't just her mother’s but other relatives and friends that were part of their journey as well. Since I consider myself somewhat of a foodie, I greatly appreciated the recipes and their origins. It gave a special touch to the book as well as some new additions to my recipe collection. I would add this book to your list. I think you will enjoy reading.
What was so special about this book was that from the beginning, you are invited in the kitchen for this shared journey. It is all too often that once a loved one passes that we come upon something that intrigues us about their life to learn more or drifts our mind to remember when. For so many like her mother who represent a time when the pressures of being a wife and mother dominated their own desires, it was the kitchen where they poured their hearts into. As for so many, the recipe box was much more than just a box with recipes in it. It represented the special moments no matter what life was like beyond those four walls the greatest memories and the best lessons our life were learned.
Whether this book represents her life or yours, the sentimental nostalgia is interchangeable. It’s books like this that make you want to go back in time and remember the familiar aromas of the simple but special times that brought the best out of life. This book not only was just filled with her story but we learned about the times that it represented as well as experiencing with her recreate those recipes as if her mother was beside her. Each chapter featured a dish that gave the reader new ingredients of her life that were made. The recipes that made the box weren't just her mother’s but other relatives and friends that were part of their journey as well. Since I consider myself somewhat of a foodie, I greatly appreciated the recipes and their origins. It gave a special touch to the book as well as some new additions to my recipe collection. I would add this book to your list. I think you will enjoy reading.
February 14, 2014
At its core, Compromise Cake is the story of a mother-daughter tale. It's a writer's attempt to sift through the past and make sense of her troubled mother, Marguerite, and understand a life gone astray.
At one point Spiller reflects: "I was too young to know who dumped whom first, my mother or the world. But eventually, the socially gregarious young bride became a sometimes volatile and indifferent woman, and uncompromising in most things, including her cakes."
There's no shortage of memoirs about mentally precarious mothers, but Spiller's choice to center the book around the kitchen -- the one place she and her mother bonded -- sets the book apart. By taking us through her mother's recipe box, Spiller reveals family history and pulls back the layers of Marguerite’s life, all with her characteristic wry humor and wit.
California and culinary history are seamlessly interwoven throughout the memoir, and the result is a fantastic hybrid of a book that transports you back to the sixties of Spiller’s childhood. You'll find out the history behind Betty Crocker's rise to power and how Chex Mix became the favorite snack food of the sixties. After all, the history of the kitchen is always inextricably related to history of the family and, ultimately, ourselves.
Each chapter of Compromise Cake centers around a recipe. And, having tried a few myself, I can even recommend them. In particular, I loved My Man Cookies. Bake up a dozen and curl up with this book. You’ll be better for it.
At one point Spiller reflects: "I was too young to know who dumped whom first, my mother or the world. But eventually, the socially gregarious young bride became a sometimes volatile and indifferent woman, and uncompromising in most things, including her cakes."
There's no shortage of memoirs about mentally precarious mothers, but Spiller's choice to center the book around the kitchen -- the one place she and her mother bonded -- sets the book apart. By taking us through her mother's recipe box, Spiller reveals family history and pulls back the layers of Marguerite’s life, all with her characteristic wry humor and wit.
California and culinary history are seamlessly interwoven throughout the memoir, and the result is a fantastic hybrid of a book that transports you back to the sixties of Spiller’s childhood. You'll find out the history behind Betty Crocker's rise to power and how Chex Mix became the favorite snack food of the sixties. After all, the history of the kitchen is always inextricably related to history of the family and, ultimately, ourselves.
Each chapter of Compromise Cake centers around a recipe. And, having tried a few myself, I can even recommend them. In particular, I loved My Man Cookies. Bake up a dozen and curl up with this book. You’ll be better for it.
December 6, 2013
Nancy Spiller's Compromise Cake is a rich and satisfying blend of family, culinary and American history, artfully blended and rendered with simplicity and humor. Though it's a real page turner, I suggest reading it a chapter or two at a time, to fully savory the artistry contained within. Ms. Spiller is also responsible for the marvelous illustrations. One caveat: I gained weight reading it.
August 14, 2016
Cute light read; I doubt, however, that I"ll make any of the recipes, as it wasn't quite what I was expecting, but the stories she ties in are entertaining and interesting. Unfortunately, I found some of the more extensive details of her more distant relatives a bit tedious.
August 30, 2015
Loved this book with great family recipes, especially the compromise cake recipe.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews