In the dark pandemic days of last December, 667 people gathered on a video call to celebrate Emily Dickinson’s birthday—and her black cake. Participants were invited to bake the recipe before the gathering, and many appeared on camera with their own rendition of the cake. The tradition had started five years before, when Emily Walhout, a reference assistant at Harvard University’s Houghton Library—which houses the largest collection of Dickinson’s poems, letters, and household artifacts in the world—finally decided to bake the poet’s recipe. The library owns Dickinson’s handwritten original recipe,…
