Apple Kuchen

My mother carefully arranges the apple slices on the batter, each slice overlapping the previous one.

I have very few memories of my mother cooking. I remember the food itself – tuna noodle casserole, hamburgers (both involved potato chips, a special treat), spaghetti with meat sauce –- simple, Midwestern fare. The fanciest meal I remember was beef stroganoff, simmering away in the electric skillet before it was poured over egg noodles. I remember cookouts on the Hibachi grill, and the fun of toasting marshmallows afterwards, trying to make them perfectly golden brown on all sides before they fell into the coals. I remember brown paper lunch bags in the refrigerator for my brother and me to take to school, with our initials written on them (including our middle initials, since otherwise, we were both “DS”). But all of these memories are of the completed meal; none involve scenes of my mother actually preparing the food.

I only have three memories that involve my mother cooking. I remember her making pancakes after Tom, one of my brother’s friends, slept over. Tom was able to eat massive quantities of pancakes; he said the secret was to eat continuously without stopping, so you wouldn’t have the chance to feel full. She made stack after stack of pancakes, and he just kept eating and eating them. I also remember her helping me make taffy for a taffy-pulling party I had. She was dreadfully sick, and the day was grey and miserable, but she hauled herself out of bed to help me make the taffy so that my friends and I could pull it. We buttered our hands to pull the hot, sticky balls into long strands. It was supposed to be cut with scissors or a knife, but we couldn’t get anything to cut through that taffy, so we just hit it on the table so that it smashed into bits. The pieces of taffy flew everywhere -– we found taffy behind the washing machine months later.

I remember my mother making apple kuchen (or apfelkuchen) -– it’s kind of like an apple tart, but the base is more cake-like. She would cut the apples into thin slices and lay them out on the batter, each one overlapping. It looked beautiful and tasted delicious. When my mother died, I looked for the recipe and couldn’t find it. My maternal grandmother found a recipe for apple kuchen that she thought was the one my mother used, but it didn’t have enough detail for me to really follow it precisely, and I was never sure it was my mother’s recipe. I don’t know why this dish mattered so much to me. Maybe because it seemed unusual –- I didn’t know anyone else who made it and most of my friends had never heard of apple kuchen. It never occurred to me at the time, but this dish is most likely a reflection of the strong German influence in Wisconsin, where my mother grew up.

I doubt my mother had any passion for cooking. She was a competent cook – I’d probably go so far as to say that she was a good cook –- but she was also perfectly willing to serve us Chef Boyardee or have us prepare our own meals, so I don’t know that she had any special love for cooking. I don’t think she taught me to cook; although she may have taught me the basic rudiments of cooking, I didn’t feel equipped to prepare a real meal until much later. I do wonder if my mother taught me to bake, though. I was making cookies and cakes long before I could cook dinner. Maybe that’s why I wanted that recipe for apple kuchen.

I gave up recreating my childhood meals some years ago. I used to make tuna noodle casserole, but could never find anyone as enthusiastic about it as I was. I tried my hand at stroganoff, but it never entered my repertoire. I don’t grill, and the days of toasting marshmallows are long behind me. While I do make spaghetti sauce, the recipe I use probably bears little resemblance to my mother’s. And I haven’t made apple kuchen in over a decade. Somewhere along the way, I switched to making apple pie. I’m not sure why. Maybe I couldn’t recreate the apple kuchen I remembered from childhood. Maybe my taste changed. For whatever reason, I let go of yet another connection to my mother.


My brother and I, making cookies (date and location unknown)