After featuring Candace Walsh’s Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity in our holiday gift guide, we received several requests for more information on the liberating tale of self-identity. Through the lens of food, Walsh recounts her life’s journey—from unhappy adolescent to straight-identified wife and mother to divorcée in a same-sex relationship—and she throws in some dishy revelations, a-ha moments, take-home tidbits, and mouth-watering recipes for good measure. Candace kindly provided us with a sneak peek of her novel, in which she and her partner Laura decide to marry, and their preparation as Laura’s home state of California passed, and then revoked, their same-sex marriage law.
Excerpt from: Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity
By Candace Walsh, Courtesy of Seal Press
…We found ourselves out on my patio, well into a bottle of chewy red wine, with stray pasta strands on plates that had moments before held caramelized squash, onions, and wilted greens from the farmers’ market. We were staring at each other, grinning until our faces hurt.
“I could marry you,” Laura said, with a smile both soulful and cheeky.
My body replied. It vaulted me into her lap, my chair flying across the porch sideways from the force of my launch. For what seemed like an hour, I just held her, hot tears streaking down my face, which was buried in her neck. I couldn’t say anything. I just held her. And she held me.
“I’m so moved,” I said. “And I do want to. I do.” “I know,” she said. “I took that as a yes.”
We swung into planning mode, unlocking our limbs from the proposal chair and heading toward the kitchen.
“I’ve always wanted to get married at the Wayfarers Chapel in Palos Verdes, California,” she said. “It’s made of glass and was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright’s son. They have same-sex ceremonies.”
We peered at the website’s photographs, which looked enticing. And at the time, California, Laura’s home state, was performing same-sex marriages.
Let’s have a cake tasting!” I exclaimed. “The only thing that’s open is the grocery store, but we can buy lots of different slices and celebrate with champagne.”
We drove the few blocks to a big, fluorescent-lit supermarket, which had that middle-of-the-night zombie-occupied feeling. Not that we noticed. Usually shy about PDA, we held hands as we picked out a bottle of Gruet sparkling wine (which we had on our first date), a piece of red velvet cake, a piece of German chocolate cake, and a piece of carrot cake, each in its own small plastic clam- shell. I knew we wouldn’t buy our wedding cake at Smith’s, but it was a fun gesture and the humble squares tasted better than my first wedding cake by a mile. And then, a few months later, California did the do-si-do that reversed same-sex marriage, and reinstated it, and clamped down on it, and brought us both to a place of impotent frustration. There was a chance that California would make it legal again. At the same time, it was demoralizing to wait like orphans asking plaintively for more porridge.
* * * We moved in together after two and a half years of courtship. For the first time, I didn’t rush in. And I understood why I had been a fool to do so before. Our engagement rings remained on our fingers, unpaired with bands. California’s same-sex marriage laws were mired in contention, and my loyal California girl didn’t want to go get hitched in a random state. I sometimes got the marriage bug, but wanted it to be something we were both enthusiastic about. So I focused on what we did have: a beautiful home together where we curled up like spoons every night, a kitchen that would turn out untold numbers of meals, rooms for my children, beds for her dogs, boxes of mingled Christmas tree ornaments in the garage, and a sideboard filled with her parents’ registry china.
I’d had a wedding dress hanging in my closet for just shy of three years when my home state of New York began to seem like a strong maybe.
I immediately started flogging my Facebook wall with every kind of call to action I could find. I emailed and called Mark Grisanti— who was not only an undecided swing voter, but the state senator of my off-campus neighborhood in Buffalo—and asked my college classmates to do the same. I called the undecided senators on Long Island, which felt pointless but necessary. I hoped, I prayed, I dreamed, I signed petitions, I held space and visualized and did every woo-woo thing you can imagine. It was like being on a turbulent airplane. I got very spiritual very quickly.
I didn’t know if it would make a difference, but I did know that if I didn’t give it my all, I would feel deep regret.
Laura swung from guardedly optimistic to resignedly pessimistic. Our hearts lurched every time the vote was seemingly delayed or passed over for discussion by the New York Senate.
We watched the vote on the eve of Santa Fe’s Gay Pride weekend. And same-sex marriage beautifully, circuitously passed, as we once again cried happy tears in each other’s arms.
I slid on the brown suede lace-up minidress I used to rock back in my German Vogue days, and Laura and I ran out to the party at Rouge Cat, Santa Fe’s gay bar, and danced our soon-to-be-wedded booties off.
* * *
This time, I was making my wedding cake. It only took me eleven years, and a world of changes, to be back in that position, and I was primed to make the most of it.
My chocolate hound Laura requested that for one tier, but it took me weeks to figure out what flavor “my” tier would be. Would I go linzer torte with almond cake and raspberry jam between the layers? Or coconut? Or natilla-inspired, cinnamon-vanilla custard? I trawled Martha Stewart’s wedding website and others, but then turned to The Cake Bible. As I turned the pages, I saw a banana cake. What about . . . Chunky Monkey–inspired banana cake studded with chocolate slabs and walnuts? It was offbeat and yet familiar, and paired well with the chocolate. It had a history with me, not free of a dark side, but I was reclaiming it and changing the medium—not to ignore the past, but to reclaim it in a healthier context.
I chose Beranbaum’s white chocolate–cream cheese buttercream, the same stuff that adorned the cupcakes I had brought to my childbirth preparation class. If there had to be a bible on our wedding day, let it be one that gives the recipe for the one true buttercream—not the one “right” way to love and live.
Photo: Ana June Creative
