not aunt emily's cake

July 10, 2020

First, a confession.

The original title of this piece was “Aunt Emily’s Applesauce Raisin Cake.” Aunt Emily is my great-aunt, Emily Noyes Poore, my maternal grandmother’s sister, the last of the increasingly impoverished but proud Poores to live on Poore’s Lane since her great-grandfather Ebenezer Poore built the house that is perched atop the hill in 1817. “Poore by name, poor by nature” is the farm’s motto.

My parents and three siblings moved into the rambling, crumbling farmhouse in 1985, returning penniless from a decade-long sojourn into the wilds of Canada. Aunt Emily was still working, and my grandmother was wheelchair-bound and increasingly frail. We moved into three unheated rooms upstairs, and our stop-over in West Newbury stretched on into years, then decades. In the end, when Aunt Emily, who had outlived my grandmother by over a decade, died without complaint on the couch in the living room, my parents had lived with her for thirty years. She left the house to my mother. My parents, who had never been alone in their four decades of marriage, began to prepare the house, which needed extensive repair, for sale. The house, with its seven generations of keepsakes and photographs, wallpaper, newspapers, and junk shoved into every crevice, and the farmland on which it stood, were sacred to me, the historian and preservationist and quirky antiquarian. At the eleventh hour, my parents sold the property to my husband and me, and we built them an in-law apartment that my father designed. They are alone at last, in a way, though we now live together forever in the Poore House on Poore’s Lane.

And what, you may ask, has this to do with Applesauce Raisin Cake? Well, let me paint a picture for you. One of the many cousins, siblings, aunts or uncles has a birthday. We all gather around the big table in the kitchen. The house smells of lilacs and musty books and cinnamon. The guest is presented with a moist, sweet slice of Aunt Emily’s applesauce raisin cake, sometimes with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, we sing and clap and all is right with the world. When, well into her nineties, Aunt Emily could no longer handle the stove, my mother took over, but in my mind, and certainly in the minds of my cousins, this is Aunt Emily’s cake, present at a thousand special occasions. I even had an imagined draft of its history when I came to write this story. I asked my mother to help me make it, anticipating tales of the kitchen adventures of my sainted great-aunt, whose bowls, sifter, and mixer my mother still uses when she bakes.

Last week, I trotted through the breezeway that connects our two houses, anticipating perhaps a yellowed recipe card in Aunt Emily’s careful handwriting. My mother had laid out the ingredients for the cake, and right in the middle was her well-thumbed copy of the 1981 Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. Taped inside the cookbook was a handwritten card – not in Aunt Emily’s handwriting, but in hers. “From Better Homes and Gardens 1968 Edition” it says. I was aghast. “Is Aunt Emily’s cake from the 1968 cookbook?” I asked. “Oh no” she said. “Aunt Emily had the 1948”, she said. “And probably the one before that.” And then she gave the obituaries of each of these cookbooks. 1948 was “covered with lard – the pages were practically clear!”. 1968 was “falling completely apart”. The best we can come up with for an origin story is that my mother, born in 1948, remembers having applesauce raisin cake for her birthday when she was very young. There is an “Apple-Sauce Cake” recipe in the 1929 International Cookbook that was given to Aunt Emily following the death of her mother when she, at fourteen, became the woman of the house. My adorably linear and completely fictitious narrative of a treasured family heirloom was slipping away.

My mother was the younger sister, gentle and shy. She was born into a multi-generational household of people whose claims on the house were preexisting and irrefutable. It was never hers. Aunt Emily was kind, generous, quiet, and powerful, in her way. She owned the farm outright until the day she died, by which time my parents were not able to put in the time and money needed to make it their own. They now live in their space, but attached to my house, on land that belongs to my husband and me. “Do you want me to look up an older recipe”?, she asks. “Aunt Emily always made it a little different than I do.” And in that moment, the color of the memory of those family birthdays changes for me. I see my mother hovering around the table, bringing spoons and plates and ice cream for the cakes Aunt Emily had made, and later, making the cakes herself while taking no credit, asking for none.

I see her wrestling with her desire for some control, some privacy, something of her own, even as she appreciates the roof over our heads, the willingness of my great-aunt to take in her whole brood, quadrupling the household in one fell swoop, my mother falling back into the role she had gone to Canada, in part, to escape. She begins to point out, almost apologetically, the ways in which her applesauce cake differs from Aunt Emily’s. “I always preferred the cream cheese frosting”, she says, and “I changed the amounts of baking soda and powder and I use less sugar and more applesauce because, well, it just seemed like a lot of sugar.”

“I want to make the cake you make”, I say. “Just how you make it”. And we make it together, in the tiny kitchen that is unmistakably hers, but with Aunt Emily’s sifter, and mixer, and bowls, and she tells me about the applesauce that her mother used to make, the smell of paraffin melting on the stove when Concord grapes ripened on the arbor, and blueberry cake for dinner when they came back from the meadow with full pails. She sweeps her hand to indicate paths she has walked since she could walk – the steps to the vegetable garden, up the rise to the chicken coop. The cake is moist and flavorful and delicious – the cream cheese in the frosting a perfect touch. My mother and I stand happily together in the presence of our ancestors, and for once, they let her speak.

The Cake

Ingredients

2.5 cups flour

1 tsp. baking powder

½ tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 tsp. cinnamon

½ tsp nutmeg

¼ teaspoon allspice

½ cup butter

1.5 cups sugar

2 eggs

2 cups unsweetened applesauce

1 cup raisins

InstructionsInstructions:

Sift together the first seven ingredients. In a separate bowl, mix butter and eggs. Add applesauce and dry ingredients in turn. Add raisins and pour into a buttered, floured 9x13” pan. Cook for 40 minutes at 350 degrees.

The Frosting

Ingredients

3 oz cream cheese

¼ cup butter

1 tsp vanilla

2 cups powdered sugar

Half and half as needed

Instructions

Mix together cream cheese, butter and vanilla. Add sugar slowly and half and half or heavy cream until smooth.

Bethany Groff Dorau is the North Shore Regional Site Administrator for Historic New England, based at the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm in Newbury, Massachusetts She has authored two books, is a primary contributor to the Defining Documents in American History Series and has published articles in the New York Times, New England Quarterly, the Encyclopedia of American History and Historic New England Magazine. She holds an MA in History from the University of Massachusetts, and lives in West Newbury with her family.