and I took over at that point. The mixture went into a tall tinned cylinder capped with a screwed on lid. It had a pivot point on the bottom fitting over a bump at the bottom of a wooden bucket. A crank arrangement snapped over a square protrusion on the lid and into slot locks on the bucket edge. Alternate layers of ice and rock salt filled the gap between canister and bucket. We took turns cranking until the crank wouldn’t turn. Sometimes one of the hens made it to Sunday dinner. Grandmaw would wring the necks of doomed chickens in the backyard, where a fire roared under big iron kettles of water. She and Aunt Diddle swirled the chickens in the hot water and scraped off the feathers. Feathers were saved, dried and filled pillows and a feather bed we still use. I wish I knew the way she made fried chicken, but I don’t. I got to help with biscuits and rolls and with cotton meringue pies. These were little pies cooked in cupcake tins. Roll out pie dough and line the bottom of each hole, then bake until lightly browned. Fill each crust with a ball of fresh cotton, and finally whip up egg whites and top each one. Bake into a lightly browned meringue. Set them out on the first day of April where they can easily be stolen. I told you she was Irish. The best thing Grandmaw made was mountain apple stack cake. It’s a lot of work, but worth it. Basically it consists of eight to ten thin spice cake layers separated by a tasty brown filling made from dried apples. The apples should be brown to start with, but brown dried apples are not found in supermarkets. Here’s how Grandmaw made a stack cake: First, you plant some Red Delicious apple trees. Later, you gather the apples and carefully — and very, very thoroughly — wash off the poison that kept the worms at bay. Peel, core and thinly slice your apples, then spread them on a sheet under the sun on a tin roof. Cover everything with screen wire to keep bugs off. When they dry, they’ll dry brown. You cook the apples a pound at a time on top of the stove in water until they are soft enough to mash up. Add water as you go to keep them from sticking. Take them out, mash with a cup each of brown and white sugar per pound of apple stuff. Add a teaspoon of cinnamon and one of allspice and about a quarter teaspoon of cloves. Stir everything and put it aside. Now for the cake layers you beat a couple of eggs, then add three quarters of a cup of buttermilk, mix in the same amount of sugar and finally half a cup of molasses. Add half a tablespoon of ginger, a scant teaspoon each of baking soda, salt and vanilla. Some add more vanilla. Stir that all up well in a big mixing bowl and add “enough flour to make a dough.” (That’s a little over five cups freshly sifted cake flour.) Divvy that dough into ten clumps and roll each one out to fit a pan — cake pan or iron skillet. Grandmaw didn’t use a roller; she pressed
out her circles by hand. Each layer bakes ten to twelve minutes in a 350 degree oven. She baked half in her electric oven and half in the coal stove oven, which held its heat better. If you don’t have two stoves, it takes longer. Spread cooked apple mixture on one cake, add another and more apple, and so forth until your cake is stacked. Wipe what’s left of your apple goo smoothly around the outside. Keep an apple stack cake in the refrigerator (or ice box) for at least a day — two or three days is better — so moist appleness seeps into every cake layer. Slice thin and serve cold. Yum. Best way to get away with that three day storage is not tell anybody about the cake. My sister made one just before she went to the hospital to give birth to her firstborn, unwisely leaving her two brothers at home to wait for news of the delivery. When she and her new little girl got home, every bit of her apple stack cake was gone. She still mentions it. The last time I had real mountain apple stack cake were ones my wife and I ordered from an index card we saw on a supermarket bulletin board in Pineville. We went way up the east fork of Straight Creek to collect them, over little bridges and through the hills and hollows of Appalachia following directions to a small house with a green yard and some sort of pens in back. On the way out, boxed stack cakes in two cartons, Patricia nudged me to look at framed pictures on the wall of the mud room. There was our elderly lady cook’s husband, proudly holding rattlesnakes in each hand. The photos had apparently been taken at snake-handling services. We were real glad we hadn’t had to go to their church to get our order. The stack cakes were mighty good, though. I had to go all the way to Europe for my first taste of another Tar Heel delicacy. On my first trip to France — back in 1984 — I’d resolved to try only new foods. I always ordered the menu of the day or spécialité de la maison — whether I knew what it was, or never heard of it. I ate fish that still had faces and many other delicacies, all tasty. Until Chartres. There, in a small restaurant by the south side of the famed cathedral, the house specialty was something called Andouillette du Paris, flambé. Sounded enticing to me, and I imagined flambé meant it would arrive full aflame. They did the flambé-ing of the andouillette in the kitchen, put out the fire and set before me on a plate a wellbrowned, round sausage looking thing. It tasted pretty good. Most food tastes pretty good to me, though I did wonder what andouillette actually was. Finally — by pawing about in my execrable French — I found out what I’d just eaten. Ha. It wasn’t exotic at all. Could have had the same thing Down East. I’d traveled all the way from North Carolina to the other side of the Atlantic to order — and taste for the first time in my life — something common to country cooking back home. Andouillette is just the French word for chitlins. PS
PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . July 2012
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