“Pieces of apples were threaded onto strings and hung in the rafters, or strewn onto quilts spread out under the chilly, bright, sunshiny autumn sky,” says Sheri Castle, a writer and expert in Appalachian food.

Those apple slices weren’t decorations. The apple orchards covering the mountainsides of Appalachia produced heaps of fruit, and the traditional method of preserving the bounty was to dry them for use throughout the long mountain winter.

Dried apples make a delicious snack all by themselves, but reconstituting them within a dessert brings out the tannins and sugars. And the classic showcase for the fruit is the apple stack cake, generally believed to have first emerged in the mountains of Kentucky.

Legend holds that the apple stack cake originated as an affordable alternative to a wedding cake. Friends and family members, the story goes, each brought a layer to the big event, where it was assembled into the day’s dessert. The taller the cake, the more beloved the bride-to-be.

It’s a sweet story, but there’s no evidence it’s true. Wedding guests would have discovered that assembling and serving the cake on the same day produces a disappointing confection. Stack-cake connoisseurs advise covering the top of each cake layer with apple butter or applesauce, and then allowing the cake to cure for between two days and a week. The aromatic blend of cake, fruit, mace, and sorghum melds into dense strata that define this mountain dessert.

Methods vary as much as ingredients. In her book Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken, Ronni Lundy claims it’s best to bake the layers one at a time in a greased and floured cast iron skillet. Jill Sauceman, who grew up in Scott County, Virginia, and now lives in Johnson City, Tennessee, learned to make the cake from her grandmother, Nevada Parker Derting. She bakes the cake layers on cookie sheets after using a dinner plate as a template to ensure uniform sizing.

“Stack cakes are a labor of love requiring both time and patience,” Castle says. “They were a generous offering from time-strapped mountain cooks and therefore made only for special occasions.”

The apple stack cake emerged from humble beginnings, but that doesn’t make it any less delicious or satisfying. In fact, putting a homemade stack cake on your holiday buffet is just about the purest display of mountain love there is.

Elizabeth Sims is the author of the two Tupelo Honey Cafe cookbooks, and her work has appeared in Southern Living, Garden & Gun, and The Bitter Southerner. A past president of the Southern Foodways Alliance, she is a member of Edible Asheville’s board of advisors.