The Old School Cake That Became One Of The Most Popular Desserts Of Early America

In the late 18th and early 19th century, Americans didn't have refrigerators or grocery stores, but that didn't stop them from eating well, and that included scarfing down a variety of desserts. While apple pie may be forever associated with America, it was another sweet treat that deserves a seat at the table for its important place in American history. It was called cider cake, and it used an ingredient deeply ingrained in the culture — hard apple cider. This was the go-to drink for early European Americans, which they typically consumed at every meal during a time when drinking water was considered a risky endeavor. Even children drank it in the form of ciderkin, a lightly alcoholic version and an old-timey drink no one enjoys anymore.

In the late 1700s, apple cider began finding its way into dessert recipes as a cheaper alternative to imported brandy. Around the same time, chemical leavening was invented in the form of an ingredient called pearlash (potassium carbonate) that produced a lighter cake texture and changed how people made their baked goods. A 1796 recipe for this cake included a teacup full of hard cider and a teaspoon full of pearlash, along with flour, butter, sugar, eggs, and spices (other recipes included dried fruit). As apple production spread across the country, helped along by an itinerant orchardist named John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed, the cider cake soon followed and became a standard American dessert.

John Chapman, born in Massachusetts in 1774, began planting apple trees used in hard cider production in Pennsylvania in the late 1700s and continued pushing westward, helping to spread not just apples but hard cider, which became cheap and plentiful. But the alcoholic drink, and by association, cider cakes, fell out of favor with the rise of the Temperance Movement in the mid to late 1800s. The cider cake might have completely died out if not for a religious group called the Shakers.

The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, a Christian sect that began in England in 1747, were called Shakers for their ecstatic dancing, one of the group's unusual features. In the years before the American Civil War, there were Shaker communities in 10 states. They were known for their delicious food, and that included cider cakes, which they continued to make even as the dessert fell into obscurity with the general public. As of September 2024, there were only two Shakers left, but their sweet treat which was once an American tradition, lives on thanks to the internet. Though Cider cake's popularity has waned, at least the kind made with hard cider, it still deserves to be honored. We can't say the same for old-school desserts like potato candy and ammonia cookies.