Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Armfield Coffey: A Brief Memoir

Of all the nice people I’ve met through my association with the newspaper business, the only one who arguably was nicer than Armfield Coffey was his wife Rachel.

When Rachel died in 1999 as the result of falling from a horse, I lamented in this space that North Carolina journalism had lost “a beautiful person.” Now the sad news has come that Armfield is gone, too, and although my conscience would be clear if I also described him as “beautiful,” I’m pretty sure that Armfield would have none of it.

In the first place, Armfield would reject any comparison that possibly could be interpreted as taking anything away from the elegant and lovely woman in whose companionship he took such obvious and understandable delight. Whenever he and Rachel were in the same room he had a hard time keeping his eyes off of her, and their partnership was so much a part of each of them that it is almost impossible to think of either without also thinking of the other.

In the second place, Armfield was a realist who harbored no delusions, especially about himself. I can almost hear him chuckle as he reads this, and saying, “Me? Beautiful? Don’t you think I have a mirror?”

Beautiful or not, Armfield was a lot like Rachel in many ways. In 1999 I wrote of her, “In a profession people with extroverts and inveterate talkers, she was a rarity: an essentially private person and a great listener.” The same was true of Armfield. During his tenure in 1988-89 he probably spoke fewer words, and those few more softly, than any NCPA president in history. He viewed giving remarks to the annual convention as equivalent to a trip to the dentist. In recent years he would drive from Boone to Raleigh to attend N.C. Press Foundation board meetings at which he said almost nothing but “aye.”

For all his quietude, however, Armfield was a genial companion who loved a good story and was quick to grab a dinner check or a bar tab. I especially enjoyed playing golf with him, because he approached the game the way more of us should – i.e., with almost fatalistically low expectations. Consequently, the rare shot that turned out successfully always brought a twinkle to his eye, especially if it took money out of your pocket, but he shrugged off the more common mediocre ones as the order of the day. His insouciant attitude towards the game seemed particularly suited to the occasion one autumn day when he hosted the NCPA board at the Blowing Rock Country Club. The weather was so foggy that on many holes you couldn’t see beyond the front of the tee, so the golf took on the atmosphere of a surrealistic hike. Relying on his store of local knowledge and the fact that he seldom hit the ball far enough to lose it, Armfield won the day.

Other than Rachel, the two things that Armfield loved most were the North Carolina mountains and the newspaper business. Whenever we first encountered each other at a sweltering NCPA summer convention he would tell me right off about how he had slept under a blanket the night before in Boone, and when the board met in the mountains he assumed the role of God’s gracious guest host. In 1989 he and Rachel hosted a dinner high atop the Linville Ridge Country Club on a spectacular night when the air was so clear that the stars seemed to be within reach and the lights of Charlotte, almost 80 miles away, were visible. Armfield could not have been more proud if he had hung the stars himself.

Armfield’s love of newspapers and newspaper people stemmed in part from the fact that he knew every facet of the business first hand. He spent his entire career at the Watauga Democrat, where he started in the press room and then became, in turn, a photographer and reporter, executive editor, and publisher. He knew what it was like to have ink under your fingernails, and also what it took to balance the books. After he and Rachel sold the newspaper in 1994 they became major benefactors of the town of Boone, Appalachian State University and several local charities. Their legacy includes Rivers Park, a 10-acre tract near the university that contains the largest living maple tree in North Carolina.

Armfield also knew that community papers often depend for their excellence on the work of young journalists who are just starting up the ladder. Therefore, after Rachel’s death he made generous grants to the North Carolina Press Foundation in her memory to fund journalism scholarships for high school students. His mode of giving was simple and singular. At the Foundation board meeting at which he increased the Rachel Rivers Coffey Fund to $75,000 he sat quietly, saying almost nothing, until we reached the “New Business” item at the bottom of the agenda. Then, with no fanfare or fuss, he reached into his briefcase and passed a check across the table, saying something like, “I hope you can use this.”

Having spent the last couple of hours reflecting on Armfield, I think my first instinct was right after all, no matter what he might think.

We HAVE lost another “beautiful person.”

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Grandma Stevens' Coconut Cake



My mother didn’t take her coconut cake recipe to her grave, but she didn’t exactly leave it lying around in plain sight, either.

Let me say right up front that the story of our search for the recipe has a happy ending; otherwise it wouldn’t be worth telling. But first, some history.

* * * * *
Christmas wasn’t a real big deal when I was growing up. Other than driving around in the car to look for the tackiest Christmas lights, my family didn’t observe a lot of holiday traditions or rituals. We didn’t do any of the stuff that everyone seems to do now, like hang an Advent calendar and send boring Christmas letters. There was a period of two or three years when my mother religiously capped off the Christmas tree decorations by applying homemade fake snow that she made by mixing something with Lux laundry flakes, but even though it looked extremely real my father convinced her to give it up because when it dried the stuff bonded onto the bubble lights and he couldn’t get it off.

At our house, the two signs that Christmas was approaching were the arrival of the Sears & Roebuck Christmas catalog and my mother saying, “I guess they’ll expect me to make a coconut cake again this year.” In this context, “they” were her brothers and sisters, with whose families we gathered every Christmas afternoon for a “pot luck” dinner which, despite its description, was as orchestrated as the Radio City Christmas Show.

The center of the table usually was occupied by a turkey or ham, but I soon learned that it was possible to gorge yourself without bothering with such pedestrian fare. My Aunt Katie usually showed up with a Pyrex dish of scalloped oysters. Aunt Jane, whose husband was a hunter, often brought venison stew. Aunt Thelma, who lived on a farm, was likely to appear with a quail pie or a pan of chicken and dumplings. My mother always made her inimitable chicken salad. (THAT recipe she apparently did take to her grave.)

These treasured personal specialties were surrounded by bowls of corn and lima beans (picked from Aunt Thelma’s garden in June, and lovingly canned or frozen), squash casserole, mashed potatoes and candied yams. Most years there were deviled eggs, and at least one red or green “congealed salad” made in a Jello mold shaped like a Christmas wreath. On the sideboard were pecan pie, chocolate chess pie, pound cake and my mother’s four-layer coconut cake. Just in case you didn’t find either of the cakes sufficiently sweet in its own right, either could be topped off with homemade boiled custard, which my mother brought in a glass milk bottle capped with a piece of tin foil.

As my cousins and I grew up and had children of our own, the Christmas dinner continued, but the fare changed some as a new generation of cooks began contributing. A broccoli casserole that sneaked in a few years ago has now become a regular. The scalloped oysters disappeared years ago into the darkness of Alzheimers, and no one is left alive who knows how to make quail pie, even if there were any quail around. Still, the food remains Southern with a country flavor; if you’re looking for smoked salmon, you’re at the wrong dinner.

* * * * *
My earliest memory concerning the coconut cake is of my father coming home from Kroger’s with a “fresh” coconut, punching holes in it with a hammer and a 10-penny nail, and draining the milk. Then he would cut away the husk with his pocketknife and carefully grate the coconut by hand. My mother insisted on fresh coconut. One year, for reasons I don’t remember, she resorted to canned coconut; she judged the result so disastrous that she threw the cake out rather than inflict it on her family.

My mother always baked the layers for her cake in two square aluminum pans. In the early days she made them from “scratch,” but eventually she switched to white cake mix to which she added her own butter. She lined the pans with wax paper so she could turn them out onto wire cooling racks. When they were completely cooled she would carefully slice them horizontally into four thin layers, three of which were spread with the mixture that she called the “filling” and sprinkled with fresh coconut. The fourth, which went on top, was left plain. As each was stacked atop the one beneath she would secure the corners with toothpicks – a procedure that was necessitated by the fact that her layers tended to be a bit uneven. When all four were in place she would set them in the refrigerator for three or four days.

A day or so before Christmas my mother would remove the cake from the refrigerator, cover the top and sides with the “icing,” and sprinkle coconut on top. She carried it to the family dinner in a large Tupperware cake box – the kind designed for an angel food cake, where the top covers the cake like a tent. She usually insisted on slicing and serving it herself -- not out of pride, of course, but to make sure that no unsuspecting relative was impaled by a hidden toothpick.

After my father died my mother switched to frozen coconut, which she found perfectly satisfactory. When Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe Butter Recipe yellow cake mix appeared in the supermarkets she began using it, because it saved a step without compromising the end result. Until 2001, when she became sick and partially blind just before Christmas, she made her cake every year. That Christmas my cousin’s wife, knowing that Mom was unable to bake, produced a passable substitute. My mother’s blindness had not affected her taste buds, however; on the way home she announced that “Joyce’s cake was pretty good, considering that she used canned coconut.”

My mother died in March, 2002 at age 86. That year, for the first time in memory, we had no coconut cake.

2003 was the year for our oldest son and his wife to spend Christmas with her family, so we made plans to travel to Ithaca, New York to visit them at Thanksgiving. About a week before the holiday our daughter-in-law Natalie called to say she and Graham had decided to continue the family tradition by making Grandma’s coconut cake. Could we please send her the recipe?

Natalie’s call sent Marilyn to the closet for a cardboard box marked “Recipes” that she had packed when we cleaned out my mother’s apartment after her funeral. Inside were my mother’s cookbooks (and her mother’s), all of them dog-eared and grease-spattered, some with loose spines bandaged in duct tape. The box also contained a mélange of dozens and dozens of loose recipes, a few of them clipped from newspapers or magazines, but most handwritten on a bewildering array of plain and lined paper, note cards of varying sizes and, in one instance, a scrap torn from a brown paper bag. There was no organization.

Marilyn asked, “Do you have any idea what we should be looking for?”

I tried turning my mind’s eye back through the years to picture my mother at work on her cake. “I’m sure it’s not in a book,” I said. “I have a vision of her referring to a piece of paper lying on the counter next to her Mixmaster.”

We set the cookbooks to one side and began going through the pile of papers. The boiled custard recipe surfaced early, along with directions for squash casserole, carrot cake and other family standbys. Many of the recipes disclosed their sources, such as “Susie’s biscuits” and “Mrs. Vaught’s vegetable casserole.” We found apple nut cake, broccoli casserole, barbecue sauce, chicken pie, chess pie, green bean salad, pumpkin roll, “Blueberry Yum-Yum,” and several versions of strawberry pie – but no coconut cake.

We went through the pile again – and again. Finally, I turned up a tan card glued to what appeared to be a page from a small homemade journal or recipe book. Under the hand-printed title “Coconut Cake” it said

2 cups sour cream
2 cups sugar
3 6-oz frozen coconut
1 Duncan Hines yellow cake mix
1 stick butter

mix and set overnight

split layers –

put on cake + let set 3 days in refrig

That was it, except that someone had drawn a crude line with an arrow from “mix and set overnight” up to the first three ingredients.

We seemed to be on the right track at last. We had the information required to make the “filling,” and the reference to “split layers” confirmed my memory of my mother patiently and painstakingly slicing the layers horizontally to make four from two. (She had to be painstaking, because her knives were old and always dull. She would complain that “this knife wouldn’t cut hot butter,” but she was never known to sharpen one.) We still had no clue, however, to the sweet, snow-white icing that coated the finished cake.

When further searching yielded nothing, Marilyn decided to evoke the collective family memory by calling my cousin, Jane Pate, whose mother and namesake was my mother’s youngest sister. During the 30 years before Aunt Jane died they had talked almost daily; Marilyn decided that if Evelyn Stevens had shared her coconut cake recipe with anyone, it had to be Aunt Jane.

Marilyn’s telephone call yielded pay dirt. Somewhere along the way my cousin had picked my mother’s brain about her coconut cake, so she knew that the last step was to spread “7-minute icing” on the sides and top of the cake and sprinkle the top with shredded coconut. She dictated the recipe for the icing, punctuating the reading with numerous warnings that “this stuff is tricky” and “you have to watch this very carefully.”

Drawing on the information that we had retrieved from memory and from my mother’s jottings, Marilyn compiled a rough recipe and shared it with Natalie in a lengthy telephone call that included a lot of statements like “just think of the layers as bricks and the filling as mortar.” Natalie set to work, and a few days later her cake was the highlight of a Thanksgiving that featured snow and bitterly cold temperatures, a thin and exhausted Graham (my mother would have said he looked “peaked”), a long, dreary drive from Manhattan to Ithaca and, thanks to horrible congestion at the Tappan Zee bridge, an even longer and drearier drive back.

In addition to producing a coconut cake virtually indistinguishable from the original except that the layers are so geometrically perfect that no toothpicks are required, our “Type A+” daughter-in-law also faithfully recorded the recipe for future generations of Stevens, and I have posted it below. It will be a wonderful legacy for my mother.

Now if we could only find her chicken salad recipe . . .
* * * * *
Grandma Stevens’ Coconut Cake

Day 1:

Mix the following and let set overnight in refrigerator:
2 cups sour cream
2 cups sugar
3 6oz packages of frozen coconut (save a bit for sprinkling on top at end)


Day 2:

Using two square cake pans, bake 2 Duncan Hines Butter Yellow cake mixes, following the recipe on the box.
Note: two mixes seemed like a lot, as one mix per pan resulted in cake mix which overflowed the pans upon baking. However, in the next step, much of the excess is trimmed off or cut away.

Cool the cakes completely before removing from pans. Split each cake into two equal layers, for a total of 4 layers.

Reserve 1 cup of the filling prepared on Day 1. Use the remainder to “build” the four layer cake. Spread a thin layer of filling on the bottom of the first layer of cake, so that it doesn’t stick to the plate. Then spread a layer of filling on the top of first layer, and add the second layer of cake. Repeat. (Like stacking bricks with a layer of mortar in between) Continue until four layers have been assembled, with icing on bottom, top and in between all layers. The very top should have a thin layer of filling only, as more icing will be added (below).

Refrigerate cake overnight.

Day 3 (or before serving):

Mix the 1 cup of filling you reserved (above) with 7 minute icing (below). Use this mixture to ice the cake, including all sides and top. Sprinkle top with coconut to finish.

7 minute icing:

2 egg whites
1 ½ cups sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
¼ cup water
1 tablespoon light corn syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla

With hand mixer, beat together all ingredients except vanilla in the top of a double boiler. Place over boiling water and beat until soft peaks form. Remove from heat and add vanilla. Continue beating until stiff peaks form. (Note: this may take longer than 7 minutes!)

Store creation in refrigerator.