Spiced Blackberry Jam Cake with Caramel Icing

Hulda (Huddy) Horowitz Cohen learned about Southern cake baking from her neighbor Julia Haralson in Blytheville, Arkansas, in the 1950s. Haralson baked a blackberry jam Bundt cake each year for Christmas, and Cohen would bake the cake for Rosh Hashanah to toast in the Jewish New Year. Jam cake, fragrant with spice, has shown up across the South, most often in Kentucky and Tennessee, with blackberry or strawberry jam-filled layers draped with a caramel icing. 

Jewish peddlers and merchants began arriving in small Southern towns to sell clothing and household goods in the late nineteenth century, long before Walmart, says Marcie Cohen Ferris, Southern Jewish foodways scholar, author of “Matzoh Ball Gumbo,” and daughter of Huddy Cohen. For Jews living in towns without synagogues and rabbis, one way of feeding their soul was at the dinner table, she says. And while fried chicken, beaten biscuits and sliced tomatoes could be found on Jewish and Gentile menus alike, jam cake reminded Jews of cakes baked by their ancestors. Ferris’s paternal grandparents, immigrants from Russia, had arrived in the Arkansas Delta from New York City in 1920. They assimilated into a world of church socials, football and layer cake.

A decade ago, when my own family was hosting a German exchange student, Philip walked into the kitchen where I was baking and knew the aroma as jam “kuchen,” just as his grandmother made for holidays back in Germany. The story goes that German immigrants, arriving via steamboats into Louisville in the early 1800s, traveled south searching for land on which to settle. When they found black walnut trees, it predicted rich limestone soil for farming. And they brought a spice cake recipe to bake with the berries that grew lush in their new home. 

Notes:

• Instead of layers, if you wish to bake this recipe as a Bundt like Cohen, it will need about 1 hour of baking time at 350°F. Dust with confectioners’ sugar after it has cooled. 
• This is the icing recipe my mother handed down to me many years ago. It is a lot easier to prepare than the old-fashioned method of caramelizing the sugar. This frosting has great flavor, dirties few pans in the kitchen and is ready in a snap. 

Taken from “Baking in the American South: 200 Recipes and Their Untold Stories” by Anne Byrn. Copyright © 2024 by Anne Byrn. Photographs © 2024 by Rinne Allen. Used by permission of Harper Celebrate. 

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