Mix ½ pound of flour with ½ pound of fresh butter; add ¼ pound of sugar, 1 egg and 1 beaten yolk, 1 tablespoonful of sweet cream and some grated lemon peel. Mix thoroughly and mold the dough into small wreaths; brush the top with the yolk of an egg and sprinkle with powdered sweet almonds. Lay in a well-buttered baking-tin and bake until a deep yellow.
This is a rich almond shortbread dough shaped into pretzels, the kind sold as Mandelbrezeln in German bakeries. The original gives weights but no oven temperature, so the two things to settle before you start are the temperature and the state of the butter.
- The weights in cupsHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups; half a pound of butter is two sticks; a quarter pound of sugar is a generous ½ cup granulated or about 1 cup confectioners'. Because butter and flour are equal by weight, this is a very short, very soft dough — closer to shortbread than to bread pretzels.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Bake at 350F; the high butter content browns quickly, and anything hotter colors the outside before the centers set. "A deep yellow" means pale gold at the edges, roughly 12–15 minutes for small pretzels.
- Chill before shapingCreamed at room temperature this dough will not hold a rope. Mix it, refrigerate at least an hour, then roll pencil-thick ropes and form the small wreaths the recipe calls for. Chill the shaped wreaths again on the tray for 15 minutes so they keep their outline in the oven.
- "Fresh butter"Nineteenth-century recipes distinguished fresh butter from salted keeping butter. Use unsalted, and add a pinch of salt yourself — the dough is flat without it.
- Sweet almondsSweet almonds are ordinary almonds. The word was there to rule out bitter almonds, a separate and toxic article then sold for flavoring. "Powdered" means finely chopped or ground, not almond flour paste; blanched and ground medium-fine gives the best crust.
- Sweet creamSweet cream simply means unsoured — any heavy or whipping cream. One tablespoon is all the liquid the dough gets, so measure it rather than eyeballing.
- Egg washOne yolk alone is thick; loosen it with a teaspoon of water or milk so it brushes on evenly, otherwise the almonds clump where the wash pools.
- YieldAbout two dozen wreaths of roughly 3 inches. They firm as they cool and should keep about a week in a tin.
Sweet pretzels of this kind are generally reckoned older than the salted lye pretzel most readers picture. The knotted loop shape is traditionally traced to medieval monastic baking, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries German and Austrian bakers are said to have used it for rich butter-and-almond doughs sold as Mandelbrezeln or Butterbrezeln, sweets rather than bread. The recipe's presence in a dated day-by-day collection of foreign dishes reflects an American publishing fashion around 1900: a dish a day, each tagged with a country, offering middle-class cooks the flavor of foreign travel from a domestic kitchen. That the compiler labels the dish simply "German" — and expects the reader to know what a wreath of dough should look like — suggests how thoroughly German baking had already settled into American cities by then.