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Cherry Coffee Cake
1 Cupful Milk 1½ Cupful Snowdrift 1 Cupful Sugar 1/2 Teaspoonful Salt 2 Eggs 1/2 Cupfuls Canned Cherries, Stoned 5 Cupfuls Flour 1 Compressed Yeast Cake Scald the milk, add a tablespoonful of the sugar and the yeast cake, dissolved in two tablespoonfuls of water or milk. Stir in a cupful of flour, cover and let stand until spongy-about an hour and a half.
Then cream together the Snowdrift and sugar, stir in the eggs, well beaten, and add this mixture to the sponge, along with the salt, remaining flour and the cherries very well drained. Beat thoroughly, pour into a small dripping-pan, which has been rubbed with Snowdrift, let rise until light, and bake forty-five minutes in a hot oven, 375 degrees F., reducing the heat for the last ten minutes, to dry out the loaf. This will keep moist for days and is really rich enough to act as a cake.
A yeast-raised coffee cake from a shortening manufacturer's promotional booklet, closer to a German Kaffeekuchen than to the baking-powder crumb cakes that later took the name. The ingredient list as printed is garbled in two places, so read the method first.
- The flour discrepancyThe list calls for 5 cupfuls of flour and then repeats "3 Cupfuls Flour" at the end, apparently a stray line in the original. Take the total as five cups, one of which goes into the sponge. Note that the method says to beat the mixture and pour it into the pan, so it is a thick batter rather than a kneaded dough; hold back the last half cup if the mixture seems too stiff to pour.
- The cherry quantity"1/2 Cupfuls Canned Cherries" is missing its whole number; the plural suggests more than one cup, most likely a cup and a half. The recipe does not say what kind of cherries. Too much fruit and the loaf turns wet and the cherries sink.
- SnowdriftA cottonseed-oil shortening sold by the Southern Cotton Oil Company. Any modern vegetable shortening substitutes cup for cup; butter can be used, allowing for its water content, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- Compressed yeast cakeCakes of the period ran roughly 0.6 oz of fresh yeast, though larger sizes were also sold. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry yeast, softened in the two tablespoons of water or milk the recipe specifies.
- Scalding the milkScalding is usually explained as destroying something in raw milk that weakens gluten, and is often said to be unnecessary with pasteurized milk. Either way the milk must be cooled to about 110F before the yeast goes in; much hotter and the yeast will be killed.
- The dripping-panA shallow rectangular roasting pan. The recipe specifies only a "small" one; a 9x13-inch pan is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Draining the fruitThe recipe says the cherries must be "very well drained"; blotting them dry and tossing them in a spoonful of the measured flour helps further. Wet fruit stalls the rise and streaks the crumb.
- The temperature dropThe original names 375F. For the last ten minutes reduce the heat; the recipe gives no second figure, but something like 325F will dry the interior without darkening the top further.
- Yield and keepingAbout twelve to sixteen squares. The claim that it keeps moist for days is fair for an enriched yeast dough; store it wrapped at room temperature rather than refrigerated, which stales bread quickly.
This comes from a manufacturer's cookbook, a genre that flourished in the United States between about 1900 and 1930: a company printed a booklet of recipes in which its own product was the indispensable ingredient and gave it away or sold it for a few cents. Snowdrift was a cottonseed-oil shortening marketed by the Southern Cotton Oil Company, and the booklets made the case that it could stand in for both butter and lard — hence the instruction to rub the pan with Snowdrift as well as to cream it with the sugar. The cake itself belongs to an older tradition than the pamphlet: a sweetened, egg-enriched yeast dough baked flat in a shallow pan and eaten with coffee, brought to America by German-speaking immigrants as Kaffeekuchen. The sponge-and-dough method used here, in which part of the flour ferments for an hour and a half before the fat and eggs are added, was a common practice for rich doughs; heavy butter and sugar slow yeast down, so the sponge gets its work done first. The recipe closes by noting that the loaf is "really rich enough to act as a cake."