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Apple Cake with Lemon Sauce
2 cups flour. 1/2 teaspoon salt. ½ teaspoon soda. 1 teaspoon cream of tartar. 3 tablespoons Cottolene. 1 egg well beaten. 7/8 cup milk. 4 tart, fine flavored apples. 3 tablespoons granulated sugar. 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon.
PROCESS: Mix and sift the dry ingredients in the order given; rub in Cottolene with tips of fingers; add beaten egg to milk and add slowly to first mixture stirring constantly, then beat until dough is smooth. Spread dough evenly in a shallow, square layer cake pan to the depth of one inch. Core, pare and cut apples in eighths, lay them in parallel rows on top of dough, pressing the sharp edge into the dough half the depth of apples. Sprinkle sugar and cinnamon over top. Bake in hot oven twenty-five to thirty minutes. Serve hot with butter as a luncheon dish, or as a dessert for dinner with Lemon Sauce. 2 teaspoons arrowroot. 1 cup sugar. 2 cups boiling water.
A biscuit-dough apple cake of the kind that turns up in American cookbooks as Apfelkuchen. It comes together in minutes, but two things in the original need attention: the fat and the leavening.
- CottoleneA branded cottonseed-oil shortening, and the reason this book exists. Substitute 3 tablespoons of vegetable shortening or cold butter, rubbed in the same way.
- The leavening is off balanceSoda and cream of tartar were the standard homemade baking powder, but the working ratio is roughly one part soda to two parts cream of tartar. Here the soda is in excess and there is no acid in the sweet milk to take it up, which leaves a soapy, metallic edge. Use 2 teaspoons of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt instead, or keep 1 teaspoon cream of tartar and cut the soda to 1/2 teaspoon.
- 7/8 cup milkThree-quarters of a cup plus 2 tablespoons. Add it gradually as directed; the dough should be soft and spreadable, not pourable.
- Hot oven425F. At that heat 25 to 30 minutes is right for a one-inch layer, and the apple edges will brown at the tips.
- The panA "shallow, square layer cake pan" is most likely an 8-inch square, though 9-inch pans were also common; the original does not specify. Filled to one inch deep it takes the full batch and serves six to nine.
- Setting the applesPressing the sharp edge of each wedge halfway down, as directed, should help keep the fruit from sliding as the dough rises. Crowd the rows; the apples shrink as they bake.
- ApplesAnything genuinely tart that holds shape: Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy. Four medium apples is about 1 1/2 lb.
- The lemon sauce is incompleteOnly arrowroot, sugar and boiling water are listed, with no lemon juice, rind or butter and no method. Slake the arrowroot in cold water, whisk into the boiling sugar water and cook until clear, then finish off the heat with the juice and grated zest of a lemon and a tablespoon of butter. The proportions for the lemon itself are not in the original and this is a reconstruction.
52 Sunday Dinners was issued by the N. K. Fairbank Company as promotional literature for Cottolene, its cottonseed-oil shortening, which is why the fat is named as a brand while everything else is generic. Cottonseed oil was a byproduct of the Southern cotton industry that food manufacturers spent the late nineteenth century turning into a cheap rival to lard, and cookbooks like this one were the marketing. The dish itself is a plain baking-powder dough with fruit pressed into the top, a form generally traced to German Apfelkuchen and widespread in American kitchens by 1900. The instruction to serve it hot with butter at luncheon or with a sweet sauce at dinner shows how loosely such a cake sat between bread and dessert.