Hermits

I grew up eating hermits all the time, because my father really likes them. No one else I knew ever ate these spiced raisin cookies though. They're still around, but they are by no means something that I see everyday. This recipe was one of the many my great-aunt collected or received from friends. Perhaps a friend named Helen Alexander gave it to her.


They're simple treats, and yet it seems that no one really has them figured out. Many believe that hermits probably originated in the New England region. One interested blogger out of Boston named Lady Gouda thinks of them as bars rather than as cookies. I can see that. Another notes that they were especially popular during the Great Depression. That makes sense, since molasses would have been cheaper than sugar.

My father didn't grow up during the Depression, but both of his parents served as social workers helping people to make it through that hard time in the city of Fall River, Massachusetts. I may not know where hermits come from exactly, but I do know that my grandfather introduced them to my father.

Or maybe their living in New England predisposed them to this molasses cookie. According to the authors of America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing through the first decades of the twentieth century, New England cooks overwhelming preferred molasses to sugar regardless of costs. Sensing that Yankee identity and New England's influence in the nation were waning, female cooks and cookbook writers looked to molasses and its historical ties to New England as a means to managing the blows to their identity. Perhaps molasses helped to foster the popularity of hermits in region.

I guess the Yankee identity crisis had subsided by the time my great aunt received this recipe, because it does not contain molasses. The hermits that my father and I have enjoyed were much darker in color than than the ones that I made from my great aunt's recipe. That's probably due to the lack of molasses and to the fact that I only had light brown sugar on hand.


Most recipes for hermits require molasses, and some, but not all, list brown sugar as an ingredient. So, this recipe is unique or unusual in that it calls only for brown sugar. Coffee is also not a standard ingredient, but there are many hermits recipes out there, including one that claims to be Pennsylvania Dutch in origin, that use coffee.

New England. Pennsylvania. No one knows where these simple, little cookies or bars began.

Nevertheless, the person who penned "delicious" on the recipe before putting it through the ditto machine was right. These hermits are really good. They may not have molasses, but even with the first bite there was no mistaking Helen Alexander's recipe for anything other than hermits.

And who was Helen Alexander? Well, what I know about her makes my knowledge of hermits look encyclopedic.

Apple Knobby Cake

Last weekend we went apple picking at Thompson's Orchard in New Gloucester, Maine and wound up with forty pounds of Cortlands and McIntoshes. I've been trying to figure out how we let that happen. In my defense, I only had one cider doughnut at Thompson's, which should speak to the fact that I have some capacity for self control. I just don't know what forty pounds of apples in two bags feels like. Thompson's is also unique for passing out pronged, lacrosse-stick-like apple pickers. That made it much easier to get many, many apples from the high branches.

Yeah, I'll blame a pronged lacrosse stick.

As one with forty pounds of apples is want to do, I have spent a lot time eating apples, incorporating apples into oatmeal, juicing apples, inquiring about how to make hard cider, making applesauce, thinking about what kind of apple pie to make, and, finally, baking Aunt Harriet's recipe for Apple Knobby Cake.

This cake was apparently once, or maybe still is, popular. I had never heard of it before and I expect that I'm perhaps in the minority. I have found versions of the recipe on the web. The Boston Globe printed a story with a similar recipe as recently as 2008. The Brattleboro Reformer out of Brattleboro, Vermont ran a story on Apple Knobby Cake just a little over a week ago. You can even have it in the dining hall at the University of Massachusettts, Amherst. It looks like a New England food and, perhaps, has origins in England.

I guess it turns out that not all of my great-grandmother's or great-aunt's recipes are thoroughly bygone.

I'm a bit stumped as to the cake's exact origins though. None of the digging I've done online or in books has turned up much of anything. Surely if so many people still eat it, maybe one person might be able to enlighten me as to where or when this cake began.

Aunt Harriet probably got this recipe in the 1970s or 1980s. My scanned copy is not great, but the original definitely went through a ditto machine and I haven't had the pleasure of smelling ditto-machine ink since I was in elementary school. (It turns out that it took a lot of alcohol to make those copies, which may explain why all my elementary-school classmates were just a little addicted to ditto.) Maybe a school-teacher friend passed it along to Harriet. I'll have to do a bit more snooping if I've ever to know.

What I do know is that this cake is really simple to make and that it's wonderfully moist and sweet with a crispy, cookie-like crust. I've made it twice now and will probably make it one more time. Do peel the apples and don't forget to add the vanilla.

A photo of the Apple Knobby Cake right before it went into the oven.

A small fraction of our apple haul.

Baked Apple Knobby Cake cooling on the table.