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German Coffee Bread
1 cup scalded milk 1/3 cup butter, or butter and lard 1/4 cup sugar 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 egg 1/3 yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm milk 1/2 cup raisins stoned and cut in pieces Add butter, sugar, and salt to milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake, egg well beaten, flour to make stiff batter, and raisins; cover, and let rise over night; in morning spread in buttered dripping-pan one-half inch thick. Cover and let rise again. Before baking, brush over with beaten egg, and cover with following mixture: Melt three tablespoons butter, add one-third cup sugar and one teaspoon cinnamon. When sugar is partially melted, add three tablespoons flour.
Coffee Cakes (Brioche) 1 cup scalded milk 4 yolks of eggs 3 eggs 2/3 cup butter 1/2 cup sugar 2 yeast cakes 1/2 teaspoon extract lemon or 2 pounded cardamon seeds 4 2/3 cups flour
An overnight sweet yeast dough baked in a shallow pan under a butter-sugar-cinnamon crumble — a streuselkuchen in all but name. The original gives no flour quantity and no oven heat, so both need supplying.
- Flour, unmeasured"Flour to make stiff batter" works out to roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups for this amount of liquid. Aim for a thick, sticky batter-dough that mounds on a spoon rather than a kneadable bread dough — it must be spreadable in the pan the next morning.
- Yeast cakeA compressed fresh yeast cake of this era was commonly in the region of 0.6 oz, though sizes varied; one-third of one comes to roughly 1/2 to 2/3 teaspoon of instant or active dry yeast. The small quantity suits a slow overnight rise, which is presumably why so little is called for.
- Overnight riseLeft at modern room temperature the dough may overshoot and collapse by morning. A cool spot, around 60-65F, or the refrigerator for the last few hours, keeps it in range.
- Dripping-panA dripping-pan is the shallow rectangular roasting pan that sat under a roast. A half-sheet pan or a 9x13 baking pan does the job; spread the dough half an inch thick and expect it to roughly double.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Bake at 375F for 20 to 30 minutes, until the topping has set and the crumb tests clean. The sugar in the topping browns quickly, so watch the last five minutes.
- The toppingMelt the 3 tablespoons butter, stir in the 1/3 cup sugar and cinnamon only until the sugar is partially melted, then the 3 tablespoons flour. Fully dissolving the sugar first gives you a glaze that runs off; the point is a stiff paste that breaks into crumbs when scattered over the egg-washed surface.
- Raisins"Stoned" here means seeded; the raisins commonly sold then still contained seeds. Modern seedless raisins need only chopping, and a brief soak in warm water keeps them from scorching on the surface.
- YieldOne 9x13 pan, cut into 12 to 15 squares. Best the day it is baked; it stales quickly.
Sweet yeast-raised cakes eaten with coffee entered American cookbooks along with German immigration in the nineteenth century, and by 1900 "German coffee bread" or "coffee cake" appears regularly in domestic-science manuals — generally a plain overnight dough with butter, sugar and cinnamon rubbed over the top, the crumb topping Germans call Streusel. Its placement among the yeast breads rather than the cakes is telling: it is leavened with yeast, mixed as a batter, and raised overnight much as the household's rolls were, so a cook who could manage bread could manage this without learning anything new. The direction to stone the raisins is a reminder that seeded varieties were still ordinary in the market.