COMPROMISE CAKE

When Nancy Spiller discovered her late mother’s teaching credential buried in the midst of a long abandoned recipe box, she felt compelled to investigate the lingering mysteries of this troubled woman. Marguerite Lenore Soult had taught for only one year before marrying, having four children and a life surrendered to mental illness, divorce and social withdrawal. Spiller realized that she had probably been her mother’s best and only student in the kitchen they had shared.

Compromise Cake explores Spiller’s life in the 1960s, learning to cook by her challenging mother’s side, as remembered through the recipe box’s mid-century and heirloom offerings. It touches on lineage, and industrial changes; it is a meditation on men, women, marriage, community and the nature of compromise. What emerges is a portrait of a woman whose own desires for a career were tragically stifled by the conventional pressures to be a wife and mother, but found expression through her daughter, an author, artist and teacher. This is a memoir that weds Spiller’s story to the universal of all mothers and daughters, and what, as they say, is baked into the cake.

“I realized that the recipe box had potential for me as a historical document providing clues to the ancestors I knew little about…” After her mother’s death in 2007, Nancy Spiller discovered her mother’s teaching credential buried in a recipe box. Her mother had taught for only one year before marrying and having four children. Spiller realized that, as a child learning to cook from her mother, she had probably been her mother’s best student. Nancy Spiller is a writer and an artist. She was an internationally syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate’s Entertainment News Service, and is author of Entertaining Disasters: A Novel (With Recipes).