Emma Stevens
"STICKIES" Baking-powder biscuit-dough Sugar, either brown or white Nutmeg Butter Spread the biscuit-dough thickly with the butter beaten to a cream. Sprinkle thickly with sugar, and grate nutmeg lightly over the whole. Roll up, cut with a sharp knife, place cut side down in a baking tin, and bake in a quick oven. For biscuitdough made of two cupfuls of flour, one-quarter cupful of butter and one-third cupful of sugar will be needed. These are delicious with afternoon tea. Smcerely Emma Stercun
APFELSTRUDEL
Cream seven ounces of butter, add alternately in small quantities seven tablespoons cold water and thirteen ounces of flour and mix it well. Let it stand for one hour under a turned-over bowl. Then roll very thin on a table covered with a tablecloth, then pull on all sides till as thin as tissue paper, without tearing. Cover with melted butter, and put thin cut apples, sugar, cinnamon, grated zwieback, raisins, and small squares of butter, then roll together. Form in the shape of a horse's hoof. Put in a buttered pan, and cover with a well-beaten egg. Bake in a moderate oven for half an hour.
Two recipes run together under one signature: a rolled biscuit-dough sweet and a full Viennese strudel. Both assume a cook who already knows her doughs, so the quantities are given loosely.
- The biscuit dough is not givenFor the stickies you need a plain baking-powder biscuit dough made with 2 cups flour — figure 4 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt, about 3 tablespoons fat cut in, and ¾ cup milk. The butter and sugar listed at the end of the recipe are the filling, not the dough.
- Quick oven425-450F for the stickies, and they will take 15 to 20 minutes. Watch the bottoms: the butter and sugar leak out and caramelise, which is the point, but it burns quickly.
- Moderate oven350F for the strudel, half an hour as written. If the top is pale at that point give it another ten minutes rather than pulling it early.
- Creamed butter mattersThe butter for the stickies must be beaten soft and spreadable, not melted. Melted butter soaks into the biscuit dough and runs out during baking instead of forming the sticky layer.
- Strudel weightsSeven ounces of butter is 1¾ sticks, about 200g. Thirteen ounces of flour is roughly 3 cups scooped, or better weighed at 370g. The hour's rest under an overturned bowl is what makes the dough pull thin — do not shorten it.
- ZwiebackTwice-baked sweet rusk, long sold in boxes as a toddler teething biscuit. Grated fine, it absorbs apple juice and keeps the pastry from going soggy. Dry unseasoned breadcrumbs or crushed plain rusks do the same job; allow about 1/2 cup.
- Pulling the doughThe tablecloth is not decorative. Flour it, roll the dough as far as the pin will take it, then work with the backs of your hands underneath, stretching outward from the centre until the cloth pattern shows through. Lift and roll the strudel by raising one edge of the cloth.
- YieldThe stickies give about a dozen from a 2-cup dough. The strudel, shaped into its horseshoe, serves eight to ten.
Celebrated Actor Folks' Cookeries belongs to a genre that flourished in the 1910s: the charity or novelty cookbook built from handwritten contributions solicited from stage performers, printed complete with facsimile signatures -- the garbled "Smcerely Emma Stercun" is a misreading of the handwritten "Sincerely Emma Stevens". "Stickies" is a household name recorded in American usage for this kind of thing, leftover or purpose-made biscuit dough spread with butter and sugar, rolled, sliced and baked, a thrifty cousin of the cinnamon roll that needs no yeast and no waiting. The Apfelstrudel beside it follows Viennese rather than Americanised practice -- the tablecloth stretch, the grated zwieback, the horseshoe shape are all standard Austrian handling -- and it may reflect the German- and Austrian-trained performers working on the American stage in this period.</p>