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While stopping in Fish Kill New York on my way to Boston, I discovered the Red Line Diner, which shouldn’t be called a diner. Here I am with one of the owners of the family business, Nick Vanikiotis!
The food goes beyond classic diner food to include clams and mussels cooked with chorizo and upscale burritos made with arugula. What they did have that was quintessential dinner food was an array of cakes, too divine, to ignore.
I love the very concept of chiffon cake. How light and airy sounding can a cake’s name get? It seems the cake was actually invented in the late 1920s by a guy named Harry Baker, known for his angel food cake, a descendent of sponge cake. He later sold the closely guarded recipe to Betty Crocker.
The best thing about chiffon cake, in my opinion, is that it was served with grape-fruit (of all things) at Hollywood’s Brown Derby in the 1930s. No matter who’s making it, chiffon lives up to its name.
Strawberry shortcake is its own miracle. Basically, it requires strawberries, whipped cream with sugar, vanilla, basically cook’s choice, atop cake – again, cook’s choice. Angel food, sponge cake, short bread cookies aka biscuits, whatever works. The history of the particular cake is mired in legend and reality. The bottom line is that strawberries grow throughout the world and people have uniformly loved them, putting them everywhere they could.
A word about sponge cake! Sponge cake is among the oldest known cakes around, an iteration appearing as early as 2000 BCE. It became popular in the U.S. in the mid-1800s, but got its greatest following in its incarnation in the 1920s as Twinkies.
Strawberry-Filled Candy: Strawberry-Filled Candy – True Treats Historic Candy (truetreatscandy.com)
Strawberry Drops: Strawberry Drops – True Treats Historic Candy (truetreatscandy.com)
Strawberry Buttercreams: Strawberry Buttercreams – True Treats Historic Candy (truetreatscandy.com)
Dark Chocolate Covered Strawberries: Dark Chocolate Covered Strawberries – True Treats Historic Candy (truetreatscandy.com)
ALL-NATURAL Strawberry Sugar: Strawberry Sugar – True Treats Historic Candy (truetreatscandy.com)
Strawberry Leaf Tea: Strawberry Leaf Tea – True Treats Historic Candy (truetreatscandy.com)