By Started writing the blog differently this week. Not sure how to explain it except that something shifted. For six years I've been writing about food and including life around the edges, like the food was the picture and the life was the frame. Now it's the other way around. The life is the picture and the food is how I got there. The soup beans aren't just soup beans — they're Monday and Betty and the company house and Earl's cough and the specific sound of pintos simmering. The fried chicken isn't just fried chicken — it's buttermilk and lard and a kitchen in Evarts and a woman who taught me without teaching me and a son who is alive because people held on. Everything I cook is a story. I just didn't know I was supposed to be telling the stories until now.
Made cornbread and milk for supper Tuesday, which sounds like poverty and is, but the good kind — the kind that chooses itself because the food is honest and filling and cheap and tastes like something your grandmother gave you when you were small and nothing was wrong yet. Cornbread crumbled into a glass of cold buttermilk, eaten with a spoon. That's it. That's supper. Betty ate this three nights a week for decades and when I asked her once why she didn't make something else she said because this is enough and why would I make more than enough. I'm fifty-four and just beginning to understand that sentence.
Connie went to a work friend's retirement party Wednesday evening and I had the house to myself, which happens so rarely that I didn't know what to do with it. I sat on the porch and listened to the neighborhood — kids playing, someone's lawn mower, a dog, traffic on the road — and missed the hollow. Missed the sound of a creek and the absence of traffic and the particular silence that mountains make, which isn't silence at all but a different kind of noise, the kind made by trees and wind and water and the earth itself breathing. I've been in Lexington eighteen years and I'm still homesick. I don't think the homesickness goes away. I think it just becomes part of the architecture of who you are.
After that Tuesday supper of cornbread and buttermilk — just a glass and a spoon and Betty’s voice in my head saying this is enough — I got to thinking about the other foods that carry that same philosophy. Chocolate applesauce cake is one of them. No frosting needed, no fuss, just pantry staples doing honest work the way Appalachian kitchens have always asked them to. It’s the kind of cake that doesn’t apologize for what it is, and I’m done apologizing too.
Chocolate Applesauce Cake
Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 35 minutes | Total Time: 50 minutes | Servings: 12
Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 cup granulated sugar
- 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 cup unsweetened applesauce
- 1/3 cup vegetable oil
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1 tablespoon white vinegar
- 1 cup warm water
- 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips (optional)
Instructions
- Preheat the oven. Heat oven to 350°F. Grease and flour a 9x13-inch baking pan.
- Combine dry ingredients. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, sugar, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon.
- Add wet ingredients. Stir in applesauce, vegetable oil, vanilla extract, vinegar, and warm water. Mix until just combined — don’t overwork it.
- Pour and top. Pour batter into the prepared pan. Scatter chocolate chips over the top if using.
- Bake. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.
- Cool and serve. Let the cake cool in the pan for at least 15 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature — it doesn’t need frosting, but a dusting of powdered sugar never hurt.
Nutrition (per serving)
Calories: 195 | Protein: 2g | Fat: 7g | Carbs: 33g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 210mg