ISSUE 68, CAKE, Part 1: Apple Sauce Cake
Apple Sauce Cake
The incorporation of fruits into cakes is an ancient practice, with the common plan being the injection of chunks of fresh or preserved fruit into a batter and then a lengthy bake in the oven. The Christmas Fruit Cake is par excellance the embodiment of the old batter + fruit chunks formula. Apples are one of the United States’ most widely grown fruit, and a rich tradition of apple cakes has come down in every region of the country. Some use dried apples, some fresh, some apple juice, and some apple sauce. The apple sauce cake because of its moisture, its way of welcoming cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, and its aromatic apple orchard smell fresh from the oven. It’s one great advantage is that the sauce is wholly incorporated into the fabric of the cake without any squishy chunks. Because many expected chunks of something in a cake, household cooks took to adding raisins to the batter (not apple chunks). Apple sauce cakes were presented shaped pan molded loaves more often than they did rounds.
Recipes published in small town newspapers tended to omit specifics on spices, because of the expense involved and uncertainty about the availability of nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, and clove at the nearest grocery. (It must be admitted, however, that provincial grocers were heroic in obtaining baking spices in even the obscurest sections of the continent. This recipe came from Abbeville, SC in 1912, published in The Press and Banner on March 6—a date when most cellar apples had passed their optimum fresh eating date, and were better cooked down into sauce.
Apple Sauce cake seemed to call out for icing or frosting, or a slathering of apple preserves to give it an addition sucrose or acid charge. In church cookbooks the contributor of a cake recipe usually provided a second recipe detailing the most appropriate accompaniment. The Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church of Roanoke, Virginia, published its Cookbook in 1925. Mrs. L. O. Hope provided her favorite Frosting—Apple Whip—when submitting her Apple Sauce Cake recipe: