We take turns in the same order, week after week: Della, Lorena, Celia, and me. The hostess sets up the card table, puts on the coffee at a quarter to one, and bakes the coffee cake. Always the coffee cake. Bertha brought it the second week of the club in 1951 and it has been on the table every Tuesday since, through forty-eight years of other people's recipes for something better.

A hostess who serves a store-bought cake puts a dime in the coffee can. This has happened four times in forty-eight years, and three of them were Louise.

Since some months have five Tuesdays, nobody keeps the same week of the month for long, so nobody can complain that she always gets the holidays. Somebody complains anyway.

The gray ones are already played. If the weather is bad, the game moves to whoever lives closest to Celia.

For the cake
1/2 cup (one stick) butter, softened
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt

For the filling and topping
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (Bertha's way) or pecans (Della's way)

Method

1. Heat the oven to 350°. Grease and flour a 9-inch tube pan.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Stir in the sour cream and vanilla.
3. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt together, and stir them into the batter just until there's no dry flour left. Don't beat it to death.
4. In a small bowl, mix the brown sugar, cinnamon and nuts.
5. Spread half the batter in the pan. Sprinkle on half the nut mixture. Spoon the rest of the batter over it and smooth it out, then sprinkle the rest of the nut mixture on top. Run a table knife through it once, around the pan, for a little swirl.
6. Bake 45 to 50 minutes, until a toothpick in the middle comes out clean.
7. Let it cool in the pan for twenty minutes. Run a knife around the edges, turn it out onto a plate, and then turn it right side up onto your good cake plate so the topping is on top where it belongs.

Bertha's two pieces of advice, as given to Lorena in 1995: "Take the butter and the eggs and the sour cream out of the icebox an hour before you start." And: "Your oven runs hot. Check it at forty." Both are good advice, I have found, and the second applies to most ovens, and certainly to mine.

It keeps two days under a cake dome, if it lasts two days, which it does not.