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German Coffee Cake
1 cup scalded milk. 3 tablespoons Cottolene. ½ cup sugar. ½ teaspoon salt. 1 compressed yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm water. 1 egg well beaten. 1/2 cup seeded and shredded raisins.
Flour.
Supplementary Recipes PROCESS: Put Cottolene, sugar and salt in mixing bowl; add scalded milk. When lukewarm add dissolved yeast cake, beaten egg and sufficient flour to make a very thick batter. Beat thoroughly until mixture is smooth. Add raisins, cover closely and set to rise. When light, spread dough in buttered dripping pan one inch in thickness; cover and let rise again. Before placing in the oven, brush over with beaten egg and cover with the following mixture. Melt one-third cup butter in a sauce-pan, add one-half cup sugar, mix with one and one-half teaspoons cinnamon. When sugar is partially melted add one and one-half tablespoons flour. Mix well and spread on cake, strew top with blanched and shredded almonds, bake twenty-five minutes in a moderate oven. 1 cup scalded milk. 3 tablespoons sugar. 1 teaspoon salt.
A yeast-raised sheet cake with a cinnamon-butter crust, written for a coal range and a shortening brand that no longer exists. A few of the quantities need reading with judgment.
- CottoleneA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the publisher of this book. Use 3 tablespoons of any solid vegetable shortening, or softened butter for better flavour.
- The sugar is almost certainly a misprintThe sugar quantity may be a misprint: one and a half cups of sugar against one cup of milk is a very high proportion for a yeast dough of this kind, and something nearer a third to a half cup would be more usual. Treat the larger figure with caution.
- YeastOne compressed yeast cake is about 0.6 oz, equivalent to one packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry yeast. Dissolve it in ¼ cup water at about 105F, and check the scalded milk mixture is genuinely lukewarm before combining or the yeast will be killed.
- Flour, unspecifiedThe original leaves the amount to the cook. Expect roughly 3 to 3½ cups for a batter thick enough to hold a spoon upright but still too soft to knead; it is beaten, not kneaded.
- Dripping panA shallow rectangular roasting pan. A buttered 9x13 inch pan gives dough close to the specified one inch thick.
- Rising timesNone are given. Reckon 1 to 1½ hours for the first rise until doubled, and 45 minutes to an hour in the pan until visibly puffed. Cool kitchens will need longer.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere around 350 to 375F. Twenty-five minutes suits a one-inch layer; since the topping colours early, test with a skewer in the centre rather than judging by colour.
- The toppingAs written, the butter is melted, the sugar and cinnamon go in, and the flour is added only when the sugar is partially melted. Keep the heat low and let it come to a thick, spreadable paste rather than a hot syrup before spreading it on the risen dough.
- Stray linesThe three ingredients repeated at the end of the process belong to the next recipe in the book. Ignore them.
- YieldOne 9x13 sheet, cut into 12 to 15 squares. Best the day it is baked.
52 Sunday Dinners was published in 1913 by the N. K. Fairbank Company, makers of Cottolene, and the shortening's appearance in nearly every recipe is the point of the book: it is a menu manual and an advertisement at once, arriving just as cottonseed-oil shortenings were pushing lard out of American kitchens. The cake itself is a domesticated Butterkuchen or Streuselkuchen, the German yeast-raised sheet cake baked in a shallow pan and finished with butter, sugar and cinnamon, brought over by nineteenth-century German immigrants and quickly absorbed into general American baking under the loose label "coffee cake" — meaning not that coffee is in it, but that it is what you eat alongside a cup. The almonds and raisins mark it as the dressier Sunday version rather than everyday breakfast bread.