Cole Escola

“She never made this cake,” Cole Escola informed me, briskly whipping egg whites as I sifted flour. It was early June, and we were baking at Joe’s Pub, the downtown performance venue, where the line cooks watched our efforts with mounting concern. The cake was a white almond cake, and “she” was Mary Todd Lincoln, whom Escola portrays as an unhinged diva with a drinking problem in “Oh, Mary!,” their self-written Broadway début. Escola boasts of having done zero research for the play—which just opened, to universal acclaim, at the Lyceum. Yet they still saw fit to question my recipe. “I feel like this is something they always did for First Ladies,” Escola said, affecting a treacly tour-guide voice. “ ‘This is a cake that she made. This was her favorite drapery.’ ” They whipped harder as I protested that Mary Todd was well known to have made the cake, and, additionally, that I’d found the recipe on the Web site of the National Park Service. Would they lie? “Absolutely,” Escola replied. “I’ve had it out for them for decades.”