Mountains, Socks, Cakes: A Story from Appalachia
My boyfriend has lived out here in Portland, OR for the past decade, and has certainly started to resemble the rich and beautiful culture of the Pacific Northwest. But, sometimes I catch a diphthong’d vowel “I”, don my amateur linguist hat, and remark on his point of origin.
(He’ll tell you his southern United States accent is adorable, and why I fell in love with him. I’d tell you I fell in love with him for different reasons, but that would probably break his heart, hence I’m writing this in parentheses in the hopes he skips over this bit. I mean…I guess his accent is kinda cute.)
I’ve loved getting to know his family, and was excited to find out that his mother Trudy had a handful of recipes from her mother Recia, who grew up in the Appalachian Mountains.
Click here for the Old Fashioned Stack Cake Recipe
Like, she was actually born in the Appalachian Mountains, not just around them. It’s not like saying “oh, I grew up in Detroit,” but really you’re from Royal Oak and just trying to convince a group of teenagers on skateboards that you know more about early-2000’s rap than they do (you don’t).
That is to say: I’ve spent my life as a Yankee city slicker and have a hard time understanding what life in a rural area would be like. Hence, I’ve been very eager to hear Trudy share stories about her mom.
The Lady From the Mountain
Alex’s grandma Recia (pronounced “REE-cey”) was born in 1918 in a very impoverished region of the country, in a community with few resources at their disposal. Her family was part of a small mining community on Rich Mountain, deep in the Appalachian Mountains, located near the border of Kentucky and Tennessee. If you’re looking for it on a map, it’s close to where Jellico is today. She was one of seven daughters.
Her father was killed in a mining accident, and Recia’s mother’s had to find a way to get by and support her family on her own. So, she opened a boarding house with her daughters, and was able to get by on a small income.
“I’m sure this [the boarding house] is where my mother learned to cook.” Trudy told me.
In 1938, 20 year-old Recia left Rich Mountain to seek out a better life in Harriman, TN. She had heard there were opportunities for women to work in the textile industry, and found work at the Harriman Hosiery Mill. As Alex has put it to me before, “My grandma made socks!”
Not only did Recia “make socks,” she was a part of one of the major industries that influenced the economic climate of Appalachia, as well as one of the better gender economic equalizers of the era (though women were still vastly underpaid compared to their male counterparts).
Starting in the early 1900s, the textile industry was one of the leading employers of women in Appalachia. Before this time, textile production had been primarily confined to the home, but once railroads were built and long-distance needs were able to be addressed by commerce, an industry was born. Since it’s inception, women were able to find work outside the home knitting, sewing, and the manufacture of ladies’ seamless cotton hose – i.e. “make socks!”
The industry wasn’t without it’s troubles, however. In 1933, the Harriman Hosiery Mill workers went on strike in reaction to 23 of their union leaders being fired, as well as other issues. It was a bitter strike that pitted the town against each other, and ended very poorly for the employees, nearly a year later.
The failure of the strike, along with a nationally down-turned economy, made life in Harriman hard in the 1930s. But during World War II, nearby facilities at Oak Ridge opened, bringing many new jobs and people to the area. Coupled with the hosiery mill and the opening of a paper mill, the Harriman economy grew from the 1940s and into the 1960s.
Recia made Harriman her home, got married, raised a family, and worked at the hosiery mill for 37 years. She came down the mountain with very few resources, but worked hard to live a life her family celebrates.
A Many Layered Cake
“It was a somewhat labor intensive dessert for a woman who stood on her feet all day at the hosiery mill,” Trudy told me, “but my mother just couldn’t celebrate Christmas without it.”
I first heard about Apple Stack Cake when I was working as a pastry cook for a fancy hotel a few years ago. It was my job to think of weekly dessert specials, and I took it as an opportunity to make desserts I wanted to learn more about or that I just thought were crazy.
Click here for the Old Fashioned Stack Cake recipe
Let it be officially noted now: this recipe does require a lot of cake pans. I had to buy a few extra to make the baking process not ridiculous (I recommend having 4, but if you have time 2 will be just fine. Or 1. Just believe in yourself.)
I heard about Apple Stack Cake as a charming dessert from Appalachia, and that it was traditionally a wedding cake. The idea was that wedding guests would bring a layer of the Stack Cake, and then it would be assembled on site, with a slathering of apple butter between each layer. It was also a popularity contest: the taller the cake, the more popular the bride & groom.
This story had been substantiated a few times over by various Appalachian texts I’ve checked out from the library (as always, thanks Multnomah County Librarians), but this wasn’t the function of the cake in Trudy’s family. Old Fashioned Apple Stack Cake was the taste and smell of Christmas, and as Trudy said, “when the pans came out, we knew the holidays were near.”
When I made the dessert for the hotel, I used a fresh apple butter I made with local, ripe apples. I thought it was tangy and exciting and felt pretty good about it. I think I had them pour some kind of creme anglaise nonsense over it, because, well, dairy is nice.
What stuck out to me immediately about Recia’s recipe is that the apple butter called for DRIED apples. Immediately I had to start planning ahead, because hilariously enough, in our food utopia, fresh fruit is far easier and cheaper to come by than dried fruit. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to find a pound of dried apples at a reasonable price by the time I wanted to make the cake, and I nearly wasn’t able to.
I strolled into my local New Seasons, and amazingly enough they were having a sale on 3 ounce packages of dried apples. Since I needed a pound, I cleared out just about the entire shelf of dried apples. I walked to the register, and one by one unloaded my airy bags of dried apples onto the conveyor belt. The kind lady working the register looked at my dried apple palace and remarked, “Wow. You must really love those.”
I shrugged. “I’m just making something weird.”
I think she caught herself, or something, and realized she didn’t want to be making a customer feel self-conscious about their purchase, so she back-pedaled and said “well, y’know, everyone has their thing!” And we went forward with the purchase, assuming that a pound of dried apples was indeed “my thing”.
Let’s Talk About Dried Fruit For a Moment
I was really excited to taste the difference a dried apple butter would make. Here are my full and complete thoughts on it being on the other side of having tried it both ways: I’d say I would always make it with the dried apples – but the taste difference is exactly what you’d expect. There’s no magical mystery flavor unlocked by using dried fruit – it just tastes more aged and “figgy” (which its strange we use a whole entire fruit to describe the flavor of dried fruit).
Dried fruit has fallen out of fashion a bit, but since I’ve been making so many older recipes these days, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to dried fruit.
I like it. It’s practical. It’s full flavored. It has a great shelf-life. I like it.
I asked Trudy about the use of dried fruit, and if the Stack Cake was ever made with fresh apple butter . ” I have never known this recipe to be made with fresh fruit…because a general store (if one was available) had a limited inventory, people ate what they could grow in their gardens, gather growing wild, or purchase when they travelled to more populated towns. They preserved what they could by drying or canning. Electricity wasn’t available in homes , therefore refrigeration didn’t exist either. Apples weren’t available on the trees or in the stores by December but could be sliced and dried in the summer and saved for winter treats such as the stack cake, fried apple pies,etc.”
As a child, she remembers her mother sitting out on her porch, peeling and slicing apples, then laying them out on an old screen door she would lay on two saw horses.
It’s hard saying no to fresh things when fresh things are so available, but I urge you to occasionally say no and try the dried version. ESPECIALLY, when it’s between eating a fruit dried when ripe (like Recia was preparing on her porch), or a fruit picked when entirely unripe and ripened by gas. It might change your expectations for flavor, but I think it’s a journey worth taking.
Also, maybe your intestines will thank you. #fiber
Making the Cake
Like Recia, I also work on my feet all day. I was tired when I made this cake, but was it worth it? YES.
The dough doesn’t take too much time, but it takes a bit of work to efficiently bake them, get them out of the pans, and reuse your pans (unless you have seven cake pans, in which case, your life will be a little easier). I have some tips and instructions for baking the cake in the recipe here.
The dried apple butter is straightforward to make. Keep it lightly heated in the pot while you bake the cakes. The butter should still be warm when it goes in between the layers. I chose to cover the outside of my cake with extra apple butter (the recipe is pretty generous), because I thought it was cute and I wanted to ensure moistness BUT – that’s not very traditional. Choose for yourself. Sometimes it can be very satisfying to play it straight and just aim to recreate history.
When you make it, be sure to plan a day ahead. The cake has to sit for 24 hours to soak up all the dried apple butter goodness. I left mine out at room temperature with a large cloche over the top. It could also be loosely covered in plastic wrap.
I made this cake about a week and a half before sitting down to write this article. I had saved a piece of the Stack in my fridge, and before writing this, I took a few bites to 1) gain inspiration and 2) culinary curiosity. I have a working hypothesis about grandma desserts: they’re built to last. I think there’s a point when a woman has been cooking her whole life that she gets far too frustrated with leftovers, and if something doesn’t keep well, she won’t make it. Let it be heard loud and clearly: this cake tasted GREAT after a week and a half of sitting around in a fridge.
This cake is quite sweet, so perchance, have handy some Kentucky bourbon, or Tennessee whiskey, or in celebration of the great town of Harriman, a town founded on temperance – a cold glass of milk.
Thank you so much to the family of Recia Ayers Devaney for sharing this recipe with me. I’ve loved getting to know you all, hearing your memories, and making new memories together. And also, thanks for teaching me how to properly say “Appalachia.”
Here’s how to say “Appalachia”
I was recently caught on an Instagram story pronouncing the word “Appalachian” like “APE-uh-LAY-shun.”
Alex’s sister Kate caught it, sent me a broken heart emoji, then set me straight . “It’s APP-uh-LATCH-un.”
“So, is the region pronounced ‘APP-uh-LATCH-uh?”
She confirmed.
Her brother, my sweet love, proceeded to pronounce it “APP-uh-LAY-shuh.” She declared he’s “losing his southern charm.” Which might be true…don’t tell him.
As with any word any person has ever bothered to say out loud, there are many hot takes on how to pronounce it, but since they’re so close to the source, I want the pronunciation of Recia’s descendants recorded here. It’s important!
Do you have a different pronunciation? Let me know! Me and my amateur linguist hat would love to hear it!
