Election Day Cake (by way of New England Folklore)

I must make Election Day Cake. Thank you New England Folklore for sharing the recipe and the story behind the cake. Readers, please check out the post.

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.

Lightening Cake

The past few months have been busy ones for me, so I have not had much time to devote to cooking. My great-aunt, the woman who made it possible for me to see all these recipes, also passed away last month at age 89. At some point I will delve into the many mimeographed recipes she acquired, by my estimation, around the office where she was an executive secretary. For today, though, I chose an easy recipe--the second recipe of the three below--just to get myself blogging again.


Well, I say easy, but my great-grandmother's instructions are not always so simple to decipher. Lightening Cake (yes, it probably should be spelled Lightning Cake, but it's a three-syllable word to some in southern New England) supposedly got its name because it is quick as lighting to make. The cake should take 20-30 minutes in the oven. I, however, chose to bake it as a loaf cake rather than a layer cake, so I let it stay in the oven for 50 minutes at 350 degrees.

By my reading of the recipe, it seems as though you first mix together the sugar, flour, and baking soda. Then, you melt your butter and add two beaten eggs to it followed by a cup of milk. Finally, you add the liquid ingredients to the dry and put the resulting batter into a cake pan or two.

I like how my great-grandmother made it explicit that the baker should "fill cup with milk" as though that were not inherently obvious. I hope she meant this phrase to mean add one cup of milk. But who knows.

I treated myself to a slice not long after I took the cake out of the oven. Experiencing the simple taste of good butter and sugar blended together sent my mind back to all the bad grocery-store-bought and package-mix cakes I suffered as a child. Lightening Cake is by far the best everyday cake that I have even eaten. Had we only kept this recipe alive I might have saved my taste buds so much indignity.

Hot Milk Cake

A few weeks ago, I tried to make my great-grandmother’s recipe for Hot Milk Cake. I failed miserably. It looked wonderful coming out of the oven, but it sank into a light-yellow gelatinous form resembling something like lemon curd trapped inside of a cake’s deflated body.

In retrospect, I probably baked it a few minutes too few and improperly sifted the flour. This time, just to be sure, I beat the eggs longer until they were really fluffy and made certain to sift the first half-cup of flour with the baking powder. I put the mixture in the oven at 350 degrees for about thirty minutes and got a cake that I think my great-grandmother would recognize.

The cake should be baked in a round tin or pan, which I left behind at my mother’s over Thanksgiving. Next time, I will make it round and I might also add a filling, as Hot Milk Cake usually had one in the middle between two layers.

Just thankful to get the cake to what I imagined to be right, I accompanied it with a honey glaze made by bringing to a boil a quarter-cup of honey, two tablespoons of sugar, and one tablespoon of butter.

Both my father’s maternal grandmother and Alice, my mother’s maternal grandmother, made Hot Milk Cake. That’s not terribly surprising. Hot Milk Cake was very popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when both women came of age. Home cooks considered it an “everyday cake,” which seemed strange to me after first attempting to make it given how horribly I failed. How can something be an “everyday cake” if it is this hard to make? Yet if you know what you’re doing, which they probably did, it’s not difficult. The cake is sweet, but not too sweet, and it’s definitely not rich, rendering it something that people could conceivably eat everyday.

Recipes for Hot Milk Cake can be found in many late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cookbooks written by middle- or upper-class women who deemed themselves experienced cooks with a mission to instruct working-class women, who they supposed inexperienced in the kitchen, on how to run a proper household. The Lowney’s Cook Book, in which I found this recipe inserted, was intended to encourage women to use Lowney’s flour, but it also purported to help the unseasoned or working-class cook to gain the skills to run something akin to a middle-class home.

Alice's recipe for Hot Milk Cake, I discovered, is almost identical to one that can be found in The Cook Book by Jane Rush, published in 1918. Rush, the president of the Massachusetts Auxiliary to the Navy Relief Society, prided herself on writing easy-to-read recipes. She was therefore perfectly suited to compose a cookbook for the “inexperienced cooks” who might have trouble intuiting the under-detailed recipes usually found in cookbooks (much like those in the Lowney’s Cook Book). Rush admitted that such recipes had ruined her efforts in the past, but she was no working-class, green cook. Not only did she know how to render recipes intelligible, her domestic servants, a sign of her wealth, encouraged her to write the cookbook.

I have no idea if Alice read Rush’s cookbook. Yet given how detailed her recipe for Hot Milk Cake is in contrast to some of the others written down by her and how similar it is to Rush’s version, my guess is that she penned this recipe at a point in her life when she was familiar with reading the more-detailed cookbooks written, like Rush’s, around World War I and later. In other words, this was probably not a recipe she inherited from her mother.

By 1918 my great-grandmother was thirty years old and recently married with an infant daughter. Until her wedding she worked outside the home. Once married she tended to the household; her husband, Ned, had a good job in a rivet factory. The recipe as my great-grandmother wrote it spoke to how middle-class, domestic ideals expressed in cookbooks informed her life as a working-class mother and housewife.