I still read magazines. Partly because I grew up with them. Partly because I like getting them in the mail alongside the water and gas bills.
In an era of digital everything, print magazines may seem old-fashioned to certain crowds. While I love scrolling my iPhone as much as the next person, I also happen to love the tactile experience of flipping pages, seeing large, analog pictures and checking out the recipes many magazines feature.
I have monthly subscriptions to several. The New Yorker. Oprah. In Style. Down East. Yankee. The latest issue of Yankee magazine features a recipe for something called Swedish Visiting Cake created by cookbook author Dorie Greenspan.
The name intrigued me. I scanned the ingredients and noticed grated zest of one lemon. That was enough to sell me on it. But the featured picture of the cake on a table with silverware and linen napkins helped, too. It took me back to my childhood at my paternal grandmother’s house where we gathered for meals as a family and talked, laughed, and enjoyed Granny’s exceptional home-cooked food.
What ultimately got me scribbling the list of ingredients on a piece of scrap paper for my next trip to the grocery store was the description under the cake’s name:
“My friend Ingela Helgesson’s mother used to claim that you could start making this when you saw guests coming up the road and have it ready by the time they were settling down for coffee. It’s thin and light with a golden sugar crust and an interior that is soft, chewy, and moist.”
First of all, how lucky were the people who came over to Ingela Helgesson’s mother’s house? To be welcomed by the smell of this cake upon stepping over the threshold followed by a fresh-from-the-oven slice on a porcelain plate with a hot cup of tea or coffee is beyond. (When I made the cake a few days after discovering the recipe, the first bite confirmed my initial hunch: this would become my newest favorite cake.)
Secondly, how beautiful is the name of this cake, followed closely by its description? Words like warm, inviting, friendly, kind, thoughtful, generous, hospitable come to mind. Words we could all use more of in our lives these days given our current cultural climate. Words we could all live by more often given how crazy and busy life seems to be anymore.
Words that have tremendous power for shaping a new definition of success moving forward.
Success Redefined
As we near the end of a transformative if not tumultuous decade, one marked by tremendous change in just about everything, the time has come to rethink what success means. Forget for a moment the number of fans and followers on Twitter, how viral a YouTube video went, IPOs and Unicorns and building an email list.
Forget the size of bank accounts, houses, job titles, teams, muscles, championships, downloads, awards, airline miles, product launches, medals, closets, accolades.
Each of these things is fine in its own right. But maybe success moving forward into the 2020s needs to be measured not so much by numbers but rather by the sentiment of that one small paragraph under the name of a simple cake in the recipe section of Yankee magazine, Nov/Dec 2019 issue.
I can’t remember the last time I saw someone coming up the road toward my house for a visit, not to mention having the impulse and ingredients on hand to throw together this cake for them. In a strange plot twist of the human narrative, I know people on Facebook I’ve never met in person better than I know my neighbors. Social platforms allow us to interact more often with connections from around the world than does living on the same street. Those same platforms also allow us to say things about others and even to others we’d think twice about saying to someone’s face.
It’s the way things are these days.
Which is why I’m wondering if maybe in this new decade, we could make our way toward getting to know our neighbors as much as we know our online friends, expressing a sweetness and civility towards each other despite our differences, and slowing down enough to find ourselves heading up the road to visit a friend or loved one for an afternoon of connection, conversation, and a warm slice of homemade Swedish Visiting Cake.
Maybe this new decade will see us putting aside our vitriol, disdain, and intolerance in exchange for something like a simple set of ingredients that, when whisked together and baked for 25 minutes in a 350-degree oven, creates one of the finest, most elegant cakes you’ll ever eat. One that brings us closer together as we share in its simplicity, tenderness, and grace.
That’s a definition of success I can get behind.
