When the French mob shouted for bread, why did Marie Antoinette decree, Let them eat cake?

Apparently the story is told to show the queens insensitivity -- or to explain how she lost her head.

Yet, who among us, wanting bread, would turn down the offer of cake?

Especially pound cake?

Now, thats something really worth rioting for, something actually worth losing ones head over.

Simplest of all cakes (a pound each of butter, sugar, flour, milk, etc,), pound cake has no peer. It bestrides the kitchens of the world like a Colossus, above the delectable but inferior layers of coconut, caramel, chocolate and Boston Cream. Pound cake is the prized possession of the peasant and the pride of the philosopher, the bridge over the troubled waters between our first and our second childhoods.

Too indescribable to be the topic of poets paeans, too sacred to be the shared main stuff of Sunday communion, pound cake stands as mute witness that there is something above and beyond everyday existence, that there is something extraordinary possible in the midst of ordinary lives, and that something supernatural can come from natural elements.

Pound cake is twice-blessed; it blesses both baker and partaker. A cooks reputation rises with the rise and aroma of pound cake. A diners foretaste of glory divine comes in the consumption of it.

Success transforms a cook into an artist; failure, into a cartoonist.

Occasional pound cakes have deserved to be bronzed and placed in spotlights in the Smithsonian as permanent reminders of the best man (and more often, woman) can create. (Sadly, there are occasional others heavy and hard enough to seem actually to be made of bronze.) The most appropriate Nobel Peace Prize would be a pound cake.

There was a time when men and women dressed formally for dinner each evening. They wore black clothing, formal dinner wear, and relied upon the food, flowers, silverware, china, crystal, and candle lights to provide the ornamentation and color of the evening.

A good pound cake is like unto a simple black dress, for one can augment it in many ways -- with boiled custard or ice cream, syrups or fruits or preserves, even spread with peanut butter or crumbled into a glass of milk. (I enjoy mine with a cold slice of baked Kentucky country ham on it.) It lends itself well to such complementarity. Because our local strawberry and peach crops were so excellent this summer, our fruits and pound cake desserts and midnight snacks have been memorable.

But good pound cake also stands well alone, its own reason for being, self-justified.

Proper and appropriate to eat any day -- or night -- of the year, pound cake does not have an annual official season. Unlike Christmas fruitcake or Easter bunny cakes, pound cake is a treat for all seasons. One is permitted to have pound cake any day one can find it. (I try to rotate days between pound cake and homemade cornbread.) Pound cake can warm the coldest of winter, and can be the breeze in any arid summer.

Receiving a pound cake made William Shakespeare the great writer he was. Of that arrival he wrote: Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious....

Will also opened the production of each of his new plays by cutting a pound cake instead of a ribbon -- a lost custom that, if revived, would guarantee any new auto showroom or shopping mall a mob. If you let them eat cake -- plain old pound cake -- youll always draw a crowd.

Larry McGehee, Wofford College professor-emeritus, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.

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