Just Dessert

I don't know what is to set this world right, 

it is so awfully wrong everywhere.

— Mary Merrick Brooks

"The most beautiful young lady in town," one bewitched bachelor said of her.

Mary Merrick of Concord, Mass., spent her youth waving away suitors, until, at 22, she finally chose one, marrying Nathan Brooks, Esq., a wealthy estate lawyer, in 1823.

Harvard-educated, Nathan was a polished and devoutly political animal. And Mary was his perfect match.

But they were different people.

Nathan, unwilling to risk his lawyer's reputation, elected to keep mum on the big issue of the day—slavery.

Mary did anything but.

She spoke out, and led the town's charge against the institution, founding the radical Concord Ladies' Antislavery Society, and organizing stops on the Underground Railroad.

Although divisive, slavery was flourishing in the 1820s, legal in half of the 24 states and the District of Columbia.

Slave-owning infuriated Mary (her own father had been a slaver in South Carolina before moving to Concord, so she knew the practice first hand).

She channeled her indignation into fundraising for the cause of Abolition—more accurately, for the cause of "Immediatism," which insisted that Black slaves everywhere be freed immediately, without national debate or compromise, or reparations to their owners.

The money Mary raised was used to pay for speaking visits to Concord by rabble-rousers like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown, and for subscriptions to radical newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator.

A hands-on fire-eater, the clever Mary searched for a fool-proof recipe for fundraising, hitting at last on sales of a tasty confection she named the "Brooks Cake."

The Brooks Cake comprised one pound of flour, one pound of sugar, half a pound of butter, four eggs, a cup of milk, a teaspoon of soda, a half-teaspoon of cream of tartar, and a half pound of currants.

Concord's society women ate it up. 

For decades, none would dare hold a lunch or afternoon tea without serving a fresh Brooks Cake—no matter her stand on slavery.