Cooking with love

The cake was covered with plastic wrap on a table in the rear of the tax collection office in Houma, where uniformed women take money that is owed and keep the books to make sure everything is recorded.

It’s all very official with the uniforms and the patches on the arms but it is also a friendly place, just across the hall from where the Terrebonne Parish sheriff meets and greets a never-ending stream of visitors.

A most unlikely place for a cake, perhaps. Moist and golden yellow on the inside it was topped by a sweet melange of pineapple and some type of syrup, just enough to add to the treat but not so much that it overwhelmed the cake beneath it.

Melizia Prosperie, who holds the rank of sergeant, proudly announced that it was created by her mother, whose name is Narie Prosperie.

If you compliment Narie on her cake she will tell you she is no baker, that her daughter Darlene, who married a doctor, wins all the prizes.

But you couldn’t win a better prize than the smiles on the faces in the Sheriff’s tax office, even if they could not be seen by Narie, who learned the recipe for the pineapple cake decades ago.

Narie makes the cake on a pan the size of an aircraft carrier – well not really, but by cake standards yes – out of ingredients she will say nothing about because if she did, well, like they say, she’d have to kill you.

So in this kitchen, where the windows look out on a big field full of swooping blackbirds, and graceful egrets, Narie does the mixing while listening to Cajun music on the radio, and the music may be part of the secret.

It takes her back to the house she grew up in, a good bit further down Little Caillou Bayou. Her daddy, Clarence T-Neg Picou, sang and played the accordian and guitar in that house, when he wasn’t out doing carpentry or shrimping on his small boat or making toys for his five kids out of wood. He used to cook and bake, too. So did his wife, Gladys Duplantis Picou, who also sang.

So when Narie makes the cake or other delights in her current kitchen, humming along with the music, singing sometimes in French and sometimes in English, the beloveds are there with her. T-Neg and Miss Gladys, and Narie’s beloved late husband, Lloyd Prosperie, who passed 7 years ago and always tasted whatever Narie baked to make sure it was good.

“He loved my cake,” she said. “He was the cake eater.”

The tasting by Lloyd went on throughout the baking process, so that goodness could be assured. Other family members do the tasting now. But even if they are in the kitchen it is Lloyd that Narie sees and senses.

“You need to have people taste it and tell you what they like or don’t like,” she said. “When I cook I still have people to taste it and say what does it need.”

Despite a modesty that is almost self-effacing, Narie acknowledges that baking has given her a philosophy that serves her well. It is advice she would give a novice baker, as well as anyone not baking who needs advice on life as a whole.

“Don’t give up and try, try again,” she said.

And for good measure, if you are baking, it’s not a bad idea to think of all the relatives gone on, to remember what it was like in some bayou kitchen from long ago.

The love recalled in memory and thought, Narie agrees, will help any cake or any meal come out better, and in the case of her family it appears there has been plenty to go around.

“It’s always better,” she said, “when you cook it with love.”