QWETCHA-WHAT?

My great-grandmother left Kaiserslautern, Germany in the late 1800s at the age of either fifteen or sixteen (there’s some family debate on that!) to live with an uncle in Pennsylvania.  

Times were tough and the United States was a place of better opportunities then. She eventually met a man, and they married and moved to Michigan.  

She had my grandmother in 1922. My grandma was the youngest of twelve children, and her mother was forty-nine when she had her. I never met her, she died long before my birth, but I have distinct memories of my grandma making plum cake every fall, just the way her mother made it.  

My parents lived half a mile from my grandma’s house, and the bus dropped me off at Grandma and Papa’s place.  

I always looked forward to plum cake time.  

When I started writing Slew Foot, I realized it would be fun to incorporate that into my own family history into the story. But as I did more research on it, I discovered something shocking.  

My grandma had been pronouncing the cake name wrong! I can sort of see how she got from Zwetschgenkuchen to Qwetcha-koo-ga but it makes me giggle every time I think about it now. My family also found it funny.  

I think I’ll just stick to calling it plum cake … 

Last weekend, to celebrate the Slew Foot release, I baked a plum cake.  

It isn’t my grandma’s recipe. I’m not sure if there even WAS a recipe that she used. The dough is basically just a sweet, enriched dough (like the base for cinnamon buns!) and topped with plums and then sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.  

But we have a cookbook from Germany, and it features plum cake from the Palatine region of Germany (where my great-grandmother came from). The directions for mixing and rising the dough were a little … vague but I managed to figure it out and I am so pleased to say that I made a beautiful plum cake.  

Whatever you call it, it’s delicious. And it brought me back to my childhood and eating it at my grandma’s kitchen table.  

I can’t say it miraculously cured any ailments of mine, but it was fun to make, and I thoroughly enjoyed thinking of Mickey & Rafe when I did it.  

If you haven’t read Slew Foot yet, what are you waiting for? 

READ SLEW FOOT HERE