My grandmother gave me her passion for cooking, for not always making a dish the same way and for cooking for a large crowd. She woke up at five every morning, an old habit from living on an active farm, and started cooking. Weekend mornings she cooked for family she was expecting and family and friends she was not. Country people rarely called ahead, but generous hospitality was still a tradition. Not offering an overabundance was the worst breach of hospitality to her. Running out of food was unthinkable.
Grandma faithfully watched Cordelia Kelly’s cooking show during the 1960s and copied the recipes. She frequently credited Cordelia when guests complimented her on a dish. One of the most frequently told family anecdotes of my childhood started with a call Grandma made to my grandfather, asking him to bring home a short list of ingredients. He joked to his colleagues at the country store, “I wonder what Cordelia’s cooking today.” Their encouraging laughter kicked off an impromptu comedy routine, which one of the women proudly related to Grandma the next time she saw her. Grandma did not laugh. During the four years I lived with them, that was the only time I saw my grandfather in the doghouse.
I wonder how pleased Cordelia would have been if she knew that Grandma usually adapted her recipes to the ingredients on hand or what she thought would work better. It wasn’t just Cordelia’s recipes. The only recipe I remember her following faithfully was one for Seven Minute Frosting in the red covered women’s club cookbook sent by her cousin in Washington State.
If we had a family food, it was the apple. Grandma’s family had always grown apples. We have old black and white pictures of apples harvested and loaded on trucks to carry them to markets in Winchester. Apple trees grew in the side yard in full view of the kitchen window. Every year my cousins and I had green apple fights that escalated to the point of building forts at both ends of the clothesline and pounding each other until the ground was slippery with smashed apples.
Some of my cousins swore they could pick her fried apple pies out of a large assortment at local events just by taste. She carefully tended racks of apples as they dried on the front porch, then tenderly cooked the apples, gently made the dough and patiently fried them. My aunt, our closest neighbor half a mile away, spent two days with Grandma learning how to make these pies. She immediately went home and tried them. All three of my cousins shook their heads on the first bite.
In addition to her fried pies, fried apples, sweet and mellow, sat on the table at almost every meal during the season. But the apple dish I remember best was a cake she adapted from a recipe my mother brought home.
One of Mother’s friends showed a talent for refining the local food and artfully presenting everyday dishes long before either was universally fashionable. Ethel lived in a small, daintily furnished dollhouse a few communities away. She and Mother were two of the few single women in the area, so they spent a lot of time together on weekends. On rare Sundays when the family wasn’t gathered at Grandma’s house, Mother went to Ethel’s home for lunch, and usually dragged me along.
Ethel served a lot of the same dishes as every other woman in the area – jell-o salads made with carbonated drinks and canned fruit cocktail (In an area where fruit grew abundantly, the banana was the most popular fresh fruit in jell-o salads.), tender bread rolls and an apple sheet cake with an almost caramel frosting – but hers were prepared and presented with a higher degree of attention and flair. Her jell-o salad was cut into small squares and served on lettuce leaves on crystal salad plates. Her uniformly sized and shaped rolls were always taken out of the oven a few seconds before the exact moment of doneness and her apple cake was always moist and attractively presented. Ethel sometimes sent a few squares of apple cake home with Mother, and all of us were eager for more.
One day Mother came home with the recipe and it became her never-fail favorite, faithfully followed to the letter, for every special occasion. Some version of this recipe was probably included in every community cookbook published during the 1960s and the 1970s, and Mother submitted it for a cookbook in a different community a few years after Ethel died. The cake was so well known that a lot of details were left out, like the size of the pan (9×13), and the ingredients were listed in the order remembered.
Mother’s Apple Cake
1 ½ cups vegetable oil
3 cups flour
3 eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla
4 medium apples, chopped
1 cup nuts
Mix oil, sugar and eggs until well blended. Sift dry ingredients and add to sugar mixture. Add nuts and chopped apples. Put in cold oven and bake at 325°F for 45 minutes or until done.
[Do not overmix this batter or the apples will rise to the top. It’s good that way, but it’s a different cake.]
Frosting
4 tablespoons butter
½ cup milk or cream
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
Cook butter and sugar over low heat until butter is melted, add milk and bring to a rolling boil. Cool and add vanilla. Pour over warm cake.
Before we even tired of Mother’s cake, Grandma started experimenting with the recipe, a different version every time until her final product barely resembled the original. She baked it in a tube pan and added lemon flavoring and strawberry jam, made from the wild berries she searched out of the hills, or rhubarb, which she grew in the back yard.
Grandma’s Fresh Apple Cake
1 cup vegetable oil
3 cups flour
2 cups sugar
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon lemon extract
3 cups diced apples
3 eggs, slightly beaten
1 cup ground cherry preserves or strawberry jam or chopped rhubarb
Mix well the first four ingredients. Add slightly beaten eggs.
Sift together flour, salt, soda and add to egg mixture. Fold in diced raw apples and preserves. Pour into greased and floured tube pan and bake at 350°F for 1 hour or until done.
Now, with Grandma dead 11 years and Mother near death, I feel compelled to create my own signature apple cake. I started with an adaptation of David Hagendorn’s Tarte Tatin Carrot Cake I found in The Washington Post. The French method of using quartered apples, almost caramelized, as a base attracted me (Grandma’s immigrant ancestor left Nantes around 1700) and I liked using a cast iron skillet, a favorite of both my mother and grandmother.
I started my own experiment in October, when Washington’s farmers’ markets were dominated by apples. Twin Springs Fruit Farmer Michael King identified sweet versus tart apples, pointed out the ones which would retain their shape when baked and told me how to store spares in the fridge so I wouldn’t run out before the next market.
I brought home samples and tagged them with post-it notes while I tried out as many as four varieties in each cake – a mixture of tart apples for the bottom/top and sweet apples grated into the batter. I passed up Granny Smiths (I’ll save them for winter when I can’t find anything else.) and baked with quartered Empires, Stayman Winesaps and Rome apples. Michael King introduced me to Jonagold, Sun Crisp and Gold Rush with the perfect degree of sweetness for the cake itself. I think Grandma used one kind for everything, a sweet apple she called a Pippin that tastes like Golden Delicious in my memory.
The first version was beautiful and I loved the moist texture, which became denser in a couple of days, but the ground cardamom was cloying and annoying. In later attempts, the cake became drier, so I started experimenting with a variety of recipes, some calling for baking soda, some baking powder, sometimes butter, sometimes oil, but I couldn’t duplicate the moistness of the first cake.
One Saturday morning I used the batter for Mother’s apple cake, which called for baking soda but didn’t include an activator. I reduced the sugar by half a cup, grated the apples instead of chopping them, replaced the vanilla with lemon zest and Calvados, and preheated the oven.
I was so eager to start baking that I didn’t walk up to the farmers’ market but used the apples on hand. I ran out of Stayman Winesaps for the top, so I dug a couple of Nittany yellow apples out of the fridge to fill in the gaps. A couple of Jonagolds were perfect for the batter. The sweetness of the Nittanys perfectly matched the sweetness of the cake, so I started using sweeter apples both inside and outside.
At our family Thanksgiving dinner, I served what I thought was the final version until my sister-in-law commented that she didn’t like the big apple chunks. Curious about how smaller slices would work, I tried it again with smaller slices of Honeycrisp, the best option available in the Roanoke supermarkets. I loved the look of the new apple presentation. The smaller apple slices accented the flavor of the cake and the reduced baking time produced a uniformly moist cake, but I did miss the crispy edges.
Ruth’s Apple Cake
4-5 sweet apples like Nittany or Gold Rush, or Golden Delicious, peeled and cut into ¼ inch slices
4 tablespoons butter
½ cup brown sugar
1 ½ cups oil
1 ½ cups granulated sugar
3 eggs, at room temperature and slightly beaten
3 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
Zest of 1 lemon
2 cups grated apples, about 2 large sweet apples, Jonagolds, Suncrisps or Gold Rush, or Golden Delicious, peeled and grated on the large holes of a box grater
2 tablespoons Calvados, optional. If not using Calvados, do not sauté apples.
Preheat oven to 325°F. Melt butter in a cast iron skillet. Sprinkle sugar over melted butter and press into pan. Overlap apples in concentric circles.
Grate apples and zest lemon, sauté in Calvados for a couple of minutes, until brandy is evenly distributed.
Combine flour, baking soda and salt.
Whisk oil and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Add eggs and blend.
Add flour mixture to oil mixture and stir with a wooden spoon until just blended.
Add apples. Stir until barely blended.
Spoon batter over apples in skillet and bake for 35-45 minutes or the center is still a little soft to the touch.
