Apple Stack Cake as Folk Tradition, Myth, and Icon in the Construction of an Appalachian Cuisine

Abstract

Abstract Apple stack cake is a dessert made of multiple cookie-like layers sandwiched together with a sauce of cooked dried apples or apple butter. It is distinctive to the Southern Appalachian region, but ethnographic research suggests that it is not widespread, challenging a popular assumption of homogeneity of mountain food culture. Within those areas of use, it seems to be a folk tradition, passed down in families and occurring in variations reflecting local and individual resources, circumstances, and tastes. Cookbooks and food media oftentimes describe it as a communally made wedding cake reflecting poverty, giving the dish a mythic status reflecting values of community-mindedness and promoting a romanticized stereotype of Appalachian identity. The cake has also become popular in food media, businesses, and scholarship as iconic of traditional Appalachian cookery. These representations frame it as an Appalachian cuisine deserving of celebration and veneration. This rhetorical shift to cuisine opens up the regional food culture to gourmetization, heritagization, fetishization, and tourism, altering the position of Appalachia in the larger public imagination.