Not Aunt Emily’s Cake...a blog by Bethany Groff Dorau
The original title of this post 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 our 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 nostalgic 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.
And what, you may ask, has this to do with Applesauce Raisin Cake? Well, let me paint a picture for you.
The Cake! (Courtesy image.)
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.
Aunt Emily, with her sisters Louise and Charlotte in front of the Poore House; the handwritten recipe card taped inside the cookbook (circa 1968) and Bethany's parents on their wedding day, 1972. (Courtesy images.)
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.
An "older" recipe (circa 1935) and Bethany's mom mixing up a little magic. (Courtesy images.)
