By Caitlin Sackville
Visitor Experience Associate

Inspired by David Brooks Stess’ powerful and thought-provoking photographs and his decades of experience working alongside Native Americans and migrant field hands during Maine’s annual blueberry harvest, I wanted to create a recipe that would showcase Maine’s precious blueberries. This cake, which is great for a crowd at a party or just as an afternoon snack, has a mouthful of blueberries in every bite and the tangy lemon icing is just enough to offset the sweet berries.

Blueberry Rakers: Photographs by David Brooks Stess is part of the Portland Museum of Art’s innovative Circa series and is on view until Sunday, May 19. The exhibition is a stunning reminder of Maine’s deeply set roots in agriculture, and of how much we still depend upon the hardworking hands of laborers who often go unnoticed and unappreciated.

Blueberry Rakers Bundt Cake with Lemon Icing
Cake
2 1/2 cups plus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour and 2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon fine sea salt or kosher salt
1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
3 large eggs, at room temperature*
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3/4 cup buttermilk
3 1/2 cups Maine blueberries** (I used the wild variety, but cultivated berries are sometimes more readily available; frozen berries are also fine)

Glaze
2 cups powdered or confections’ sugar Zest
juice of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Generously grease a 10-cup Bundt Pan, either with butter or a nonstick spray. Set aside.

In a medium bowl, sift together 2 1/2 cups flour (leaving out the extra 2 tablespoons), baking powder, and salt and set aside. In the bowl of a stand mixer or large mixing bowl, cream together the butter, sugar, and lemon zest until light and impossibly fluffy, about 3 to 5 minutes. Then, with the mixer on a low speed, add your eggs one at a time, scraping down the bowl between each addition. Beat in vanilla, briefly. Add 1/3 flour mixture to batter, beating until just combined, followed by half the buttermilk, another 1/3 of the flour mixture, the remaining buttermilk and remaining flour mixture. Scrape down from time to time and don’t mix any more than you need to. Toss the berries with the remaining 2 tablespoons of flour. With a rubber spatula, gently fold the berries into the cake batter. The batter will be very thick and this will seem impossible without squishing the berries a little, but squished berries aren’t always a bad thing!

Spread cake batter — you might find it easier to plop it in the pan in large spoonfuls, because it’s so thick — in the prepared baking pan and spread the top smooth. Bake for 55 to 60 minutes, rotating the cake 180 degrees after 30 (to make sure it browns evenly). The cake is done as soon as a toothpick comes out clean of batter.

Set cake pan on a wire rack to cool for 30 minutes, before inverting the cake onto a serving platter to cool the rest of the way. Cool completely.

Once cool, whisk together the powdered sugar, lemon zest, juice and butter until smooth and very, very thick. (If you’d like it thinner, add more juice, but I like the thick drippiness of it, seen above.) Spread carefully over top of cake, letting it trickle down the sides when and where it wishes. Serve at once or keep it covered at room temperature for 3 to 4 days.

Notes-
*Because I used farm-fresh, richly colored eggs, my batter and cake was subsequently darker than if you use store bought eggs.
**If you choose to use cultivated blueberries, you may want to decrease the amount slightly, because of their larger size.

Caitlin Sackville is a Visitor Experience Associate at the PMA. Visit her blog, Look Good Eat Well for creative recipes and original photography.

By Nancy Foss
PMA Docent

*Join Nancy on Saturday, March 30 at 1 p.m. for a Gallery Talk. Free with PMA admission.

March 8 was International Women’s Day and the entire month of March has been designated Women’s History Month—a great time to consider the contributions a few extraordinary women have made to the Portland Museum of Art.

The PMA collection includes many well-known women artist, but it is the philanthropic activities of women behind the scenes that made the PMA what it is today.

Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat
The McLellan House was originally designed and built in 1801 by the local house wright John Kimball Sr. for the merchant sea-man Major Hugh McLellan and his family. If it wasn’t for the third private owners of the house, Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat and her husband Colonel Lorenzo de Medici Sweat, the PMA would not exist as it does today! The McLellan House could have been demolished or converted into condominiums but instead, thanks to the philanthropic activism of Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat, the Portland Museum of Art was born at the corner of Spring and High St.

Margaret and her husband Lorenzo were both Maine natives. They spent winters in Washington D.C., where Lorenzo was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, and used the McLellan House as a summer home until they retired. While she was in Washington D.C., Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat became fully engaged in the cultural and intellectual life of the country. She was an author, a literary critic, and a novelist (including the novel, Ethel’s Love Life, a story about the complexities of educated women’s friendships, including friendships characterized as “Boston Marriages.”) Margaret was a world traveler, fluent in five languages, a founding member of the women’s club movement, and involved in the women’s suffragist movement. Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat was also a strong proponent of historic preservation; while in Washington D.C., she championed the historic restoration and preservation of Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate. And Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat was an art patron.

Retiring in Portland, Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat quickly became an ardent patron of the local art scene. She was an early member of the Portland Society of Art (founded 1882), the predecessor to the Portland Museum of Art.

Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat understood the McLellan House was as architectural monument and did little to alter the structure, with the exception of turning the office into a library. This gesture announced her sentiment that entertaining and socializing are not an enterprise separate from the world of the intellect. She strongly believed that art makes for an enriched community, so when she died in 1908, she left her house and her money to the Portland Society of Art. Hugh McLellan had built his house to announce that Portland was part of the civilized world and Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat continued the legacy by leaving her home to enrich the community with art. The PMA stands where it does today because Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat was a philanthropic activist.

Joan Whitney Payson

Joan Whitney Payson was another philanthropic activist who made a significant contribution to the PMA. Joan Whitney was born in 1903 into a family described as a pantheon of strong and creative women. She was 10 years old when she attended the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York City, the show credited with introducing Americans to modern art. (The Whitney family contributed financial backing for this show). Collecting art and opening museums was practically a competitive sport for the rich and famous during Joan’s formative years; the PMA is very fortunate to have benefited from this sport! Joan Whitney cemented her foundation in Maine when she married M. Charles Shipman Payson of Falmouth.

The Joan Whitney Payson Collection came to the PMA in 1991 and included great works that form the core of the European Impressionist collection such as such as Gustave Courbet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley.

Elizabeth Noyce and Katherine F. Woodman
At the PMA, you can see Anne and Her Nurse by American painter Mary Cassatt. I consider this work of art a trifecta in my discussion of women’s art and the art of philanthropic activist: a woman artist, donated by a woman philanthropist, in honor of another woman art activist. The Cassatt painting is part of the Elizabeth Noyce Collection.

The Elizabeth Noyce Collection came to the PMA in 1996 and includes 64 works of American art works by Marsden Hartley, Andrew Wyeth, George Bellows, and more. Elizabeth Noyce donated Anne and Her Nurse by Mary Cassatt in honor of Katherine F. Woodman. Katherine F. Woodman was a philanthropist in her own right as she was deeply and personally involved with the transformation of the PMA from a small community art gallery to a major regional museum. Woodman became a philanthropic activist; she showed up, rolled up her sleeves, and was, what I like to call, the “gritty” on a committee. The Precinct Committee, the Century III Campaign, The Committee of One Hundred, and The Board of Trustees have all benefited from Katherine F. Woodman’s art activism. Like Margaret Jane Mussey Sweat, Joan Whitney Payson, and Elizabeth Noyce, Katherine F. Woodman believed art makes for an enriched community.

So, as you wander the PMA galleries, you can engage with art created by talented women like Mary Cassatt, Marguerite Zorach, Isobel Bishop, and Louise Nevelson, but remember it was the creative energy and philanthropic activism of other women that gave these great works of art a wall to hang on!

Image credits: Unknown photographer, Mrs. Margaret Mussey Sweat, nd, black and white photograph mounted on canvas. Museum collection.; Jo Davidson, Joan Whitney Payson, 1933, polychrome terra cotta on marble base. Museum purchase with support from John Whitney Payson.