Edna Lewis’s apple cake recipe

“When I was a girl growing up in the small farming community of Freetown, Virginia, preparations for Christmas started in early September, when we children went out to gather black walnuts, hickory nuts, and hazelnuts (…) Using a nut pick or sometimes a hairpin, we’d pry the nutmeats from the shell – rich, flavorful nutmeats that, even on those warm, bright days, filled us with happy anticipation because we knew they would be baked into delicious Christmas cakes and cookies.” – Edna Lewis, Christmas in Freetown

 

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the amazing learning experience I had at the Southern Food & Beverage Museum, when I traveled to New Orleans last summer to cover the Americas selection for the Pastry World Cup and the Bocuse d’Or. A highlight of my visit to the Museum was the Edna Lewis section.”The Grande Dame of Southern cooking,” Chef  Lewis was featured prominently, along with Chef Leah Chase and other female chefs who made history with their culinary excellence and pursuits.

As author Taryn White explains in Smithsonian Magazine, Virginia-born Chef Lewis did more than anyone to elevate Southern food to haute cuisine. Her seminal 1976 cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking was a best seller, “catapulting her onto the national stage and motivating other American chefs to embrace Southern food—and to honor seasonal, local ingredients. It has been reprinted 23 times and saw a revival in 2017, when it shot up the Amazon best-seller list after a 2017 episode of “Top Chef” in which contestants prepared a dish in homage to Lewis’ philosophy of food.”

 

Chef Lewis was “a champion of Southern cooking and an enchanting storyteller.” A proponent of locally sourced food long before it was fashionable, she “would go to great lengths to seek out only the most genuine and freshest ingredients” (What Made Edna Lewis the Mother of Soul Food”)

 

I also recently came across a Christmas cookbook with recipes from various chefs, including Chef Lewis, which got me super excited to make one of her dishes. One thought led to another, and another – and so I decided to make a cake to honor Chef Lewis’s memory 🙂

 

I was missing a lot of the ingredients required for Chef Lewis’s Christmas fruitcake recipe featured in the book above, but I found an equally delicious creation online, her apple cake with caramel glaze.

 

Adorned with apples and pecans and covered in rich homemade caramel, this cake captures the essence of adventure and belonging, which permeates Chef Lewis’s memories in “Christmas in Freetown.” Visualized while reading Chef Lewis’s account, the luscious “meat” of the pecans in this cake came to life to provide exceptional flavor and texture, accentuated by the contrasting softness of the cake and the free-flowing caramel. It was my first time making this cake, and the beginning of a beautiful Christmas tradition.