Hulu’s Delicious New Adaptation of a Bestseller Pulls Off Something I’ve Never Seen on TV
The title of Black Cake, Hulu’s new adaptation of Charmaine Wilkerson’s bestselling novel of the same name, speaks to those in the know. The show, executive-produced by Oprah, follows two estranged Black American siblings who are brought together when their Caribbean mother dies, leaving behind audiotapes revealing the truth of her tumultuous life—one that, unbeknownst to them, spanned multiple countries and name changes, and decades of severe trauma. The title is a reference to the Caribbean rum fruitcake usually made around the Christmas season. But it carries another layer of meaning, touching on not just the myriad manifestations of oppression and adversity that a Black woman may face, but also the beauty that is made in spite of that—or, in fact, because of it.
Black Cake is about Blackness, darkness, sweetness, and, pun intended, just desserts. But it is also about, well, cake, among other beloved dishes of Caribbean cuisine. What the show does so well is depict the relationship between food and the diaspora: the idea that communities are connected not merely by blood or location, but by the things, both intellectual and tangible—like the recipes you remember, as well as the dishes that come from following those recipes—that they take with them. Because of this, no matter how far you stray from your roots, you can always, in some way, come home.
The series tells the story of Coventina “Covey” Lyncook, an Afro-Chinese Caribbean girl who runs away from tragedy to the United Kingdom using her estranged mother’s surname, Brown. There, she experiences even more harrowing hardships, but her inability to safely return home leaves her no choice but to adopt another name, Eleanor Douglas, which she uses for the rest of her life, only changing her surname when she marries. At home, Covey would find solace in her mother’s singularly phenomenal black cake. Throughout the remainder of her life, after Covey has been forced to flee her home and her loved ones, the cake brings her comfort. The cake becomes a point of pride and a meaningful symbol to her children as well, a tangible reminder of their amorphous and distant cultural background. When Covey—by then, Eleanor—dies, she leaves a black cake in the freezer for her estranged children to share as they make sense of the harsh realities their mother is entreating them to hear from beyond the grave.
Black cake has many names—rum cake, or if your family’s Caribbean history is, like mine, more closely entangled with the British flavor of colonialism, rum plum pudding. My grandmother, my aunt, our family friends, and I have gathered on numerous December days to make my family’s famous rum plum pudding recipe. It’s a laborious process that, for some, like my grandmother, starts months before, when she soaks an assortment of fruits in rum. When we get together to bake, the rummy fruit is blended together and mixed into a cake batter full of the usual butter, sugar, flour, eggs, and, most importantly, spices. It’s a lot more technical than I’ve let on—the separating of the egg whites, the careful folding of the batter, the water bath to create steam in the oven—but I’m not in the business of revealing precious family secrets. Just trust me when I say that making this is a euphoric experience, with the dessert’s boozy aroma intermingling with the sounds of Caribbean Christmas music, the mentions of old island neighbors whom I’ve never met, and the sublime first mouthful of the pudding, as we remember all those to whom we wish we could offer a taste.
Seeing the role that black cake plays in Black Cake felt personal. The work that goes into making the cake is no different than the work that goes into passing down culture from one generation to another, especially when one of those generations can no longer lay direct claim to the ancestral homeland—an educational lesson between those who are from a place and those who are merely of a place. A dish like black cake is also a bridge connecting migrants back to the lands they came from. On the show, the dessert’s ability to transport those eating it to a different time and place feels so true to real life. Other Caribbean dishes in the show exemplify this, too: When young Covey is deeply missing home, surviving in the U.K. by remaining unnoticed, but struggling with feeling perennially unseen, she attempts to make fish soup for the kids she’s nannying. The family’s housekeeper points out that it’s a Chinese soup in origin, but I recognized the soup as a likely variation on Jamaican fish tea or Trinbagonian fish broff. By cooking this, Covey is reasserting her identity after having had to hide who she is in the interest of self-preservation.
But, while food can help forge connections, the series demonstrates how it can also reflect frictions. When Covey attempts to feed the fish soup to the white English children she is nannying, one of them spits it out quite violently, in what reads as a literal rejection of Covey’s cultural identity. In the show’s fifth episode, available on Wednesday, another character, Mabel—who appears to be white, and is labeled an “ethno-food guru” due to her anthropological studies of food pathways—comes under fire for stating, while being interviewed on a TV special, that it’s hard to say any one recipe comes from any one place. One of Caribbean rum cake’s main ingredients, cane sugar, originally came from Asia, explains Mabel—so “whose cake is it, exactly?”
Mabel’s questioning of gastronomical ownership gets quickly rebutted by a Black panelist, who asserts that no matter the answer to Mabel’s question, the people of the diasporic communities those recipes come from are entitled to a voice in the debate of that recipe’s ownership. It’s interesting that the show plays with this idea for a little while with Mabel’s introduction into the plot, because as powerful as cuisine is, so too is the broad cultural debate it provokes. A part of why Caribbean foods are so magical to people of the diaspora is because they tell a story that includes them specifically—the show, built around those dishes, seems to agree with that much. But this argument requires a built-in level of gatekeeping. The cuisine, like much of the wider culture, can be enjoyed by everyone, but can it only be understood on some kind of deeper level by people of that community? Yes, the food can take you elsewhere, but some would say the transportation is more potent if you have some claim on an ancestral, ethnographical, or cultural origin—a place or person in your mind to be carried to.
It’s not entirely clear where Black Cake falls on these matters. It seems more interested in touching on the myriad conversations regarding diaspora and culture than making its own specific argument. The show seems to hint, via Covey’s experiences, that you can share Caribbean food with the world, but still maintain its inherent nature and significance for yourself and your community. It seems to hint that there are certain people, like Covey, who have not only been kept alive with this food’s sustenance, but maintained their sense of identity by recognizing within the dishes a deeper level of significance. Black Cake shows that, like its title, Caribbean food is given to the world, but with an extra wink and a nudge for those who know where its magic lies.
