Beet Red Velvet Cake

When it comes to food, the division between what is “southern” and what is “Black” is as blurred as the boundary between where Harlem ends and Sugar Hill begins. (I’m inclined to say, though I’m sure others will argue, that just as all of Sugar Hill is in Harlem but not all Harlem is Sugar Hill, all southern cuisine is Black food, though not all Black food is southern.) This is an especially salient point when it comes to red velvet cake, which holds the distinction of being perhaps the most popular dessert in the soul food kitchen. Never mind the fact that it isn’t really southern and doesn’t have deep roots in Black culture.

How a cake that was, as most scholars agree, invented at New York’s Waldorf Astoria in the 1920s, made popular by a man who sold red food coloring in the 1930s, and spread nationally in the 1950s came to be seen as the ultimate soul food dessert is unclear. But by the time I was growing up in the Bronx and spending time in East Harlem, red velvet cake was on the menu of every soul food restaurant on 125th. Perhaps none was as well known as the Kool-Aid red version made by Sylvia Woods of the iconic Sylvia’s.

Luckily for me, at the time, my mother was working at the now-closed Sugar Hill Bistro, a restaurant that served upscale soul food which included, naturally, a version of red velvet. Whereas Sylvia uses food coloring, this recipe uses beetroot to give the cake its supernaturally silken texture and a deep crimson hue. It was this recipe, along with seafood gumbo, that I’d ask my mother to make every birthday and still do, up to this day.

This recipe was excerpted from ‘My America’ by Kwame Onwuachi. Buy the full book on Amazon. Click through for more cake history →