A Foodie's Notes on the Vernal Equinox:

We very rarely had snow where I grew up, but as I stood at my grandmother's apron strings, I was taught to respect the turning of the seasons.

Winter was cold enough for the warming comfort food most of us still associate with it -- steaming bowls of soup, pot roast in rich gravy, hot coffee and cake to go with it.

Summer meant barbecue, soft drinks ("pop" to grandma, and we never got it except at cookouts) and pies bubbling with the best of the summer fruit while less perfect specimens were packed into canning jars by an assembly line of women working in the basement of the church.

Autumn was pumpkin, apples and turkey as we got ready for Halloween and Thanksgiving. And spring ... well, spring was getting ready for Easter.

On the weekend of the Equinox, my grandmother changed all of the household linens -- sheets to tea towels -- from winter's cream and evergreen to her favorite shades of sky blue and butter yellow.

That Monday, she set up the glass pots with thermometers that clipped onto the sides, steel baking sheets that unrolled like April thunder and vials of curiously intense flavor extracts that heralded Easter candy-making. Always planning, (Depression-era housekeepers needed no time management coaching), she made candy in the mornings before turning her attention to lunch and the afternoon errands.

Keep reading about why a chiffon cake is an important statement of spring awakening after the jump.

I got home from school to find the morning's labors packed, between perfectly cut layers of waxed paper, in boxes for me to take to "the back porch." By the time I got done placing them just so on oak shelves behind mosquito netting, she had the supper fixings laid out and a cake in the oven for dessert.

I can still hear my grandmother's voice: "I just don't know why no one bakes chiffons anymore." To her and most of her contemporaries, a chiffon cake was as important a statement of spring awakening as the mockingbirds that drove them all crazy raiding their berry briars.

My grandmother's chiffon cake came out of the oven in a tube pan that she immediately inverted onto a rack, and, in the tradition of old-fashioned kitchens, was frosted while still warm. She used a boiled seven-minute frosting that she spiked with the orange oil left over from the morning's cream drops.

If you're prone to poetry, you can write a few couplets relating springtime to the foamy egg whites that give chiffon cake its characteristic texture, silky and airy at once, somewhere between sponge and angel food. Eggs, after all, are the central symbol of spring fertility as the earth awakens from winter dormancy. Rabbits (such as the one who brings eggs on Easter Sunday) are noticeable practitioners of fertility, and of course, farm eggs come from chickens and spring's hatchlings come from eggs.

My grandmother was never one to argue with poetics, but I think she associated early spring with chiffon cake simply because she was attuned to rhythm while not bothering to examine it. After a winter of heavy coats and fireside meals (pleasures, by the way, I would never disparage, nor would my grandmother have), spring appetites express their awakening with delicacy. By texture, execution and for that matter intention, a chiffon cake is the perfect expression of this delicacy of appetite -- not unlike its cousin the chiffon pie, whose fluffy self would start to appear at special functions by May Day at the latest.

For now, while most of us are still waiting for the first hours of sun to turn into days of it, I am remembering the specialness of beginnings -- that same rhythm that quickens our pulses at the turn of each season and then climaxes them at each season's peak.

I made orange chiffon cake this weekend, and urge you to join me in keeping alive the tradition of this delightful old-fashioned dessert.

What I believe was my grandmother's recipe is in a pamphlet stuck inside her battered copy of the Farm Journal Country Cookbook; I am sad to report it is too faded to be usable in my kitchen or for uploading here for yours.

I used Fannie Farmer's recipe for chiffon cake (page 525 in my edition, with orange frosting on page 540); in addition, there are good recipes for chiffon cake here and here.