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Dutch Apple Cake
1 pint Five Roses flour ½ teaspoon salt ½ teaspoon soda 1 teaspoon cream of tartar ¼ cup butter 1 egg 1 cup (scant) milk 4 sour apples 2 tablespoons sugar Mix the dry ingredients, add the egg beaten and mixed with the milk. The dough should be soft enough to spread ½ 1/2 inch thick on a shallow baking pan.
Core, pare and cut the apples into eighths, lay them in parallel rows on the top of the dough, sharp edge down, and press enough to make the edge penetrate slightly.
Sprinkle the sugar over the apple and bake ½ 1/2 hour. Eat while hot with butter or with lemon sauce. -From Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book
A soft biscuit-style dough baked under a layer of apples, closer to a cobbler top than to a modern cake. The soda and cream of tartar together are simply homemade baking powder.
- Flour by volumeA pint of flour is 2 cups, about 250 g. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian flour; ordinary all-purpose is the right substitute.
- LeaveningThe ½ teaspoon soda plus 1 teaspoon cream of tartar can be replaced with 2 teaspoons baking powder. If you keep the original pair, mix and bake without delay, since the acid starts working the moment the milk goes in.
- ButterThe recipe never says to melt it. Rub or cut the cold ¼ cup into the dry ingredients as for biscuits, then add the egg and milk.
- Oven temperatureThe original assumes you know; bake at 400F. Half an hour is right for a ½-inch dough in a shallow pan, testing the centre with a skewer.
- Sour applesMeans a tart cooking apple, not a spoiled one. Granny Smith, Bramley or Northern Spy stand in; if using a sweet eating apple, add a squeeze of lemon and go easy on the sugar.
- Setting the applesThe sharp edge down and slight press presumably anchors the wedges so they do not slide off as the dough rises, and lets the juice run into the crumb; the recipe itself gives no reason.
- SugarTwo tablespoons over four apples is barely sweet by current taste. Eaten hot with butter or lemon sauce, it reads closer to a tea or supper bread than to a rich dessert cake; increase to a quarter cup with cinnamon if you want it sweeter, or leave it and rely on the sauce.
- Pan and yieldAn 8- or 9-inch square pan gives roughly the ½-inch depth intended and serves six to eight. Serve it the day it is made; it goes heavy once cold.
The name has little to do with the Netherlands. In nineteenth-century American usage "Dutch" is often said to have pointed to Pennsylvania German cooking, where fruit pressed into a raised or quick dough was a standard way to use windfall apples, and the dish sits alongside German Apfelkuchen and the plum and apple cakes of the same tradition, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented. The attribution here is to Mary J. Lincoln, first principal of the Boston Cooking School, whose Boston Cook Book of 1884 preceded and shaped Fannie Farmer's better-known volume. Its appearance in a Canadian flour-company cookbook is typical of the genre: milling firms appear to have borrowed freely from the authoritative domestic-science writers of the day, perhaps because a recipe with a respected name behind it sold flour.