I grew up in a time when almost everything was simpler, at least in the mountains. That doesn’t mean things were easy; they were just simpler. We stayed pretty close home and centered our activities around family and church. And with family and church activities came food, so much good food. Dinner, whether served on the kitchen table or “on the ground” at church, was home-cooked and made from ingredients straight from the garden or from garden foods we had canned or frozen. Our dishes were simple but rich in taste and texture.
Maw (Retha Eller Spencer) was the best cook I have ever known, bar none. She could take anything and make it into something delicious and filling. Maw never used a recipe for anything she cooked, with one exception, and that was dessert. Maw loved to make good desserts, partially because she loved to eat “just a taste of” dessert, but more so because she loved to see everyone else eat her desserts. And so, she left nothing to chance, following recipes to the letter. In her later years, I think she considered Italian Cream Cake her biggest accomplishment because it had more ingredients and was more expensive to make than any of her other desserts. I think she may have gotten the recipe from the newspaper, and it was a really big deal for her to make. She impressed many a willing stomach with it. Maw’s Italian Cream Cake was perfect every time, but it wasn’t really who Maw was. Maw was chocolate pie and pound cake, and Maw was the best stack cake ever. And, true to form, Maw didn’t have an exact recipe for her stack cake. She just knew when it was right. Sweet, with a hint of bite, and just soft enough, it practically melted in your mouth. Maw’s stack cake was like a taste of heaven.
Maw made her stack cake with the simplest of ingredients and just a little differently than what I believe most Appalachian cooks did, and that’s partly what made it so memorable. I think most stack cakes involved slathering some cinnamony apple butter between the layers. Maw’s did not. She relied on the sweet tart taste of transparent applesauce that had soaked into her “cookie layers” over several days to give her stack cake its light and crisp taste. It was a much purer taste, and one I still prefer over the spicy cinnamon taste of most stack cakes.
The simplicity of the ingredients of Maw’s stack cake was one thing; the difficulty of putting it together and getting the same texture and taste hers had was quite another. After numerous attempts and just as many failures, I have finally accepted the fact that I will never be able to get Maw’s stack cake just right, and if I did, I doubt I could do it twice. Her layers were never more than a fourth of an inch thick after they were baked; the dough was almost paper thin. When I try to make mine that thin, they just fall apart. She could make a stack of 10-14 layers that stood just as straight as a soldier at attention. Mine always slump over to the side like a drunken sailor. She knew exactly the right amount of perfectly sweetened transparent applesauce to pile on top of each layer so that it soaked in just right. I use either too much, making it run down in a pool around the bottom of the cake, or too little, making the cake dry enough to stick to the roof of my mouth. The lesson I have taken from Maw’s stack cake is that simple does not always mean lack of complexity.
Stack cake was for those days when you had extra time on your hands because it was a labor intensive endeavor. It took a long time to make. Maw didn’t often have a lot of extra time, but Paw always liked a little something sweet at the end of dinner (the middle of the day meal for us). Enter Sonker Pie, which at our house wasn’t so very different from stack cake, but was infinitely easier to make. In fact, we each made our own! That didn’t bother Maw a bit.
Now, this wasn’t the kind of Sonker Pie that is akin to cobbler. In fact, I think sometimes those two terms are almost interchangeable in most of Appalachia, but not for us. Our Sonker Pie was made right at the table. First, you had to have a bowl. Into that bowl, you took a hot crusty biscuit, preferably a thin one, and broke it open into the bowl. Next, you got the bowl of that same sweet tart transparent applesauce that was between the layers of Maw’s stack cake and that was always on the table. You spooned just as much of it as you wanted over the biscuit. To that, you could add as much sugar from the table as you wanted or none at all if the applesauce was sweet enough for you. It was all a matter of taste. Finally, you picked up the cream pitcher and liberally poured cream over it all. Voila! All done and ready to eat! Yummy-yum-yum!
These two desserts are Appalachia at its best. They represent both a simpleness and a complexity that is characteristic of the lives of so many mountain folks. And both the desserts and the Appalachian people are far more than what you would expect at face value.
For those of you who would like to try your own hand at Maw’s stack cake, I am happy to share her recipe with you. It appears below.
In sweet memory of and an unending love for her, I am proud to share:
Maw’s Stack Cake
2 cups sugar
1 cup butter
1 cup sour milk
2 tsp. Soda
1 tsp. Vanilla
Plain flour to handle
Cream sugar and butter together. Add butter, sour milk, and vanilla and mix until combined. Stir in baking soda and add flour a little at a time until you have a soft dough that handles easily. Take portions of the dough and roll into very, very thin layers. Lay a fluted tin pie plate over the rolled out dough and cut around it with a knife. Remove the pie plate and use your rolling pin to carefully roll the cut dough onto a cookie sheet. Do this for as many cookie sheets as you can fit in the oven. Bake at 450 degrees until golden brown. Cool and remove layers to wax paper to cool. Repeat for as many layers as you can make with the dough.
After all the layers are cooled, set the first layer on a cake plate and cover with transparent applesauce. Put the next layer on top of the first. Repeat layering with applesauce until all the layers have been used.
Let the stack cake set in a cool place for 1-2 days until most of the applesauce has soaked into the cake.
**These are my childhood memories of growing up in Appalachia. They are true but also subject to the normal foibles of the mind.