Emily Dickinson’s Handwritten Coconut Cake Recipe Hints at How Baking Figured Into Her Creative Process

The Emi­ly Dick­in­son Muse­um will tell you that “The kitchen appears to be one of the rooms where [Emi­ly] Dick­in­son felt most com­fort­able, per­haps most at home.” But the “many drafts of poems writ­ten on kitchen papers tell us also that this was a space of cre­ative fer­ment for her, and that the writ­ing of poet­ry mixed in her life with the mak­ing of del­i­cate treats.”

We still have access to Dick­in­son’s gin­ger­bread and dough­nut recipes. But if you want to see an exam­ple of how bak­ing nour­ished her cre­ative process, then look no fur­ther than Emi­ly’s recipe for Coconut Cake. The image above shows the ingre­di­ents scratched out in her hand­writ­ing:

1 cup coconut
2 cups flour
1 cup sug­ar
1/2 cup but­ter
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
1/2 tea­spoon soda
1 tea­spoon cream of tar­tar

On the flip side of the recipe, Dick­in­son then wrote the begin­ning of a poem, “The Things that nev­er can come back, are sev­er­al” (read the tran­script here). Pre­sum­ably the recipe inspired the poem, but per­haps it was the oth­er way around?

If you’re look­ing for your own source of cre­ative inspi­ra­tion, you can try out Dick­in­son’s recipes for Black Cake and also Rye and Indi­an Bread here. (Accord­ing to The Pub­lic Domain Review, “her loaf of Indi­an and Rye won sec­ond prize in the Amherst Cat­tle Show of 1856.”) And you can even head up to the Emi­ly Dick­in­son Muse­um in Amherst, MA and take part in their annu­al bak­ing con­test.

Over at NPR, Dick­in­son schol­ar Nel­ly Lam­bert has more on the poet­’s rela­tion­ship to bak­ing and food.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Online Emi­ly Dick­in­son Archive Makes Thou­sands of the Poet’s Man­u­scripts Freely Avail­able

The Sec­ond Known Pho­to of Emi­ly Dick­in­son Emerges

Watch an Ani­mat­ed Film of Emi­ly Dickinson’s Poem ‘I Start­ed Early–Took My Dog’