Make a biscuit dough; roll out very thin and put on a well-buttered cake-pan. Have ready some apples. Cut in quarters; lay closely on the cake; sprinkle thick with brown sugar; add some cinnamon and a handful of currants. Pour some fresh melted butter over the cake; set in the oven to bake until done. Serve with coffee.
A one-line German apfelkuchen of the plainest sort: biscuit dough for a base, apples, sugar, butter. The original assumes a cook who knows her dough and her oven, so the gaps are worth filling.
- "Biscuit dough" means American baking-powder biscuitRoughly 2 cups flour, 1 tablespoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons butter cut in, and about 3/4 cup milk. It is a scone-type dough, not yeast dough and not a sweet cake batter.
- Roll thin, and it will still riseRolled to about 1/4 inch it will puff to something like a scone base under the fruit. Any thicker and the middle stays damp beneath the juicing apples.
- PanA well-buttered 9x13 inch pan takes that quantity of dough at the right thickness. A rimmed sheet pan works if you press the dough out to the same depth and leave a margin.
- Quartered apples are too coarseQuarters of a firm apple will not cook through in the time the base needs. Peel, core, and cut into slices about 1/4 inch thick, then shingle them tightly "closely on the cake" as instructed. Five or six medium tart apples fills a 9x13.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh redcurrants or blackcurrants. A handful is about 1/3 cup; plumping them in warm water for ten minutes keeps them from scorching on top.
- Butter and sugar quantities"Sprinkle thick" is about 3/4 cup packed brown sugar with 1 to 2 teaspoons cinnamon; "some fresh melted butter" is 3 to 4 tablespoons poured over the fruit. Fresh here means sweet rather than salted, a live distinction when much butter was kept salted.
- OvenBake at 375F for 35 to 45 minutes, until the edges of the dough are browned and the apples give no resistance to a knife tip. The book's "until done" assumes a range oven judged by hand.
- Yield and servingTwelve squares from a 9x13. It is meant warm, cut in the pan, with coffee -- not a dessert course but an afternoon cake.
This is Apfelkuchen in its everyday form, the sort of sheet cake associated with the German afternoon ritual of coffee and cake rather than with the dinner table, which may be why the recipe ends "serve with coffee" instead of naming a course. The base here is American biscuit dough rather than the yeast or short dough more usual in German versions, an adaptation to American kitchens. Books of this type, offering a dish a day from a different nation, were published around the turn of the twentieth century, and their "foreign" recipes are often plainer and more Americanised than the label suggests. Currants and cinnamon with apples was a familiar pairing in both traditions, so the dish would have read as exotic mainly in its name.