Jewish apple cake is a Bundt pan-style coffee cake laced with cinnamon and layered with sliced apples, making it extremely moist and delicious. Yet my Jewish husband was put off by its name.

"What's with the Jewish apple cake? Why not Quaker dinner rolls or Catholic muffins?" he would quiz the baristas at Last Drop or Tuscany, who looked as puzzled as if he had just asked them why they were serving coffee.

When Jewish Cooking in America author and PBS-TV series host Joan Nathan came to town last winter, I made a point to ask her about Jewish apple cake.

At first, she seemed almost as puzzled as the baristas. It was the word "Jewish" that apparently threw her. But after hearing a fuller description, she said, "The Baltimore Sun used to publish recipes for it; I remember some from members of a church who called it that." She said those recipes were basically identical to the apple Bundt cake her mother-in-law made for years and that she herself made this time last year for Rosh Hashanah.

THE APPLE DOESN'T FALL FAR: Louise Taichman with Audrey Claire's popular bubbe's cake. : Michael T. Regan

"It's an American variation on a traditional Eastern European recipe for what was in those days a very fancy cake served to visitors and on the holidays," said Nathan. The cake is especially popular during the Jewish New Year, when eating sweet foods is thought to insure a sweet year.

It also contains vegetable oil instead of butter and orange juice in place of milk to meet kosher laws saying that dairy cannot be eaten at the same meal as meat. This may also explain the "Jewish" moniker.

But being from D.C., Nathan couldn't speak to the dish's year-round popularity with sweets eaters of all ethnic and religious backgrounds in Philly, at least not with the authority of Country Sweets owner Gerard Corsi, and Mike Yealy of Whole Foods.

"It's one of [the] hardcore local traditions — like pound cake and butter cake — that you see around here but almost nowhere else," says Corsi, whose Woodbury, N.J., bakery supplies a number of Center City gourmet supermarkets (South Square, Great Scot, etc.) with Jewish apple cake, plus a unique Jewish apple cake muffin.

Whole Foods regional baking coordinator Yealy says Jewish apple cake was first introduced into a local Whole Foods "years ago" and did so well that it is now sold in all 28 of the chain's mid-Atlantic stores, although he says "its greatest popularity and familiarity is in the Philadelphia region." Yealy regularly gets notes or phone calls from people in the far reaches of the area who, like my husband, smell anti-Semitism in the cake's name — so regularly, in fact, he says, "I'm very seriously considering calling it something else outside of Philly."

Jewish apple cake is "what non-Jews like to call it," says Ruth Isaac Treatman of Old City Coffee. "We call ours apple cake."

It's called bubbe's cake at Audrey Claire Taichman's eponymous Rittenhouse restaurant, in part because the cake recipe belonged to her mother, Louise Taichman, who is also a bubbe (a Jewish grandmother). Audrey Claire is one of several local businesses that are famous for this dish.

Roz Bratt credits this cake for launching her second career as a baker. It was 1992 and Bratt was working at Mellon Bank at Second and Chestnut streets when a little luncheonette opened up nearby that boasted home cooking. "But they were selling Drake's cakes." When Bratt offered to bake for them, the owners asked if she made Jewish apple cake. She didn't but quickly got a recipe from a family member. That luncheonette is no longer around but you can now buy Bratt's Jewish apple cake at Mugshots and at her own Homemade Goodies by Roz on Fifth Street.

And if you've ever wondered about the bake shop growing out of the front of the Northeast's Dining Car diner, owner Nancy Morozin says the popularity of their Jewish apple cake is to blame.

"So many people were coming in to buy apple cake that our restaurant customers were having to wait to pay their bills," says Morozin, who decided to build a bakery that now offers the cake in bundt, sheet, loaf and round sizes.

The down-home favorite has been the signature item on the dessert menu at Audrey Claire since two weeks after the restaurant opened in 1996. "With all that was going on, I wasn't eating," says Taichman. "So my mother made one of her apple cakes and sent it over to the restaurant. It was so moist, so good, I told everyone, 'We have to put this on the menu.' Some people were skeptical: They wondered if it might be too boring. But it became our best-seller."

(cwyman@citypaper.net)