The following is an online extra from the Fall 2019 edition of RVA Traveler.
Red Truck Rural Bakery's Alma Hackney rum cake (Photo from the "Red Truck Bakery Cookbook" by Andrew Thomas Lee)
While visiting the Red Truck Rural Bakery’s Warrenton location for an article in our fall issue of RVA Traveler, I bought a rum cake on the recommendation of cashier Adam Chipman. Following up with bakery owner Brian Noyes afterward, I asked if there was a story behind the light-tasting, flavorful cake, which quickly disappeared when I shared it with friends the next day.
Alma Hackney
There is, Noyes told me. It originated with Alma Hackney, the choir director at the church Noyes’ husband, Dwight McNeill, attended in Sanford, North Carolina. Hackney “made a mean rum cake for her friends and made sure it was always waiting for Dwight when he returned home to Sanford,” Noyes says via email. “She’d send Dwight’s dad into the store for the booze while she hunkered down in the car, since no self-respecting Presbyterian choir director could be caught in a liquor store.”
Hackney died in 2005 at age 95, but left her recipe with Noyes and McNeill, an architect who designed Red Truck’s Warrenton location in a renovated Esso station and its newer and much larger headquarters in an old pharmacy and Masonic lodge about 12 miles north in Marshall.
The bakery won a 2018 Southern Living Food Award for its rum cake, which also rated a mention in O, The Oprah Magazine’s listing of its “Best Online Grocery Sites.” Red Truck has sold 1,535 of the cakes in its stores during the last year, and shipped another 927 to customers around the country, Noyes says.
He shares another funny anecdote: “A woman came into our Warrenton store needing a cake for a church meeting. She liked the look of the rum cake, paid for it and left. She drove around the block, came running back into our bakery and asked, ‘Does your rum cake have rum in it? I’m going to an AA meeting!’ We gave her a coffee cake, but she wouldn’t give up her rum cake.”
Noyes will be in Richmond on Oct. 19 as the featured speaker for the Library of Virginia Literary Awards Dinner, where he will spotlight Virginia's culinary traditions. And naturally, he will bring dessert.
