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It's the BitterSoutherner Podcast,

episode four of our second season from Georgia Public Broadcasting

and the magazine I edit The Bitter Southerner. I'm Chuck Reese and today we're talking about cake.

Not just any cake, but here are a couple of facts about your host.

One, I was an only child and two, my mama died of cancer when I was just

11 years old. And I bring this up today only because of something that I'd learned a couple of days after she passed away.

And I learned it the first time I walked into the kitchen of the funeral home

where her body lay in repose.

And on the tables in there I had never seen

so many beautiful cakes in my life. And that was the beginning of my

knowledge about a specific part of southern culture.

See, when a small town community in the South prepares to come together to honor someone

who has passed away, something clicks in the brains of the community's

kegbakers. They get to thinking. They remember little acts of kindness done for them by

the departed. They remember what she

loved to eat, the little things she said to them over the supper table. And then

they take all that information and bake the exactly right cake.

And the cake stands on a table in a funeral home kitchen, not merely a solace for the grieving but as a tribute

to the one who's gone away. The exactly right Cake is in its own humble way a historical document.

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