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German Coffee Cake
Scald and cool to lukewarm one-half pint of milk. Add one heaping tablespoon of butter and two of sugar; one-fourth of a yeast cake dissolved in a little warm water, a speck of salt, and flour enough to make a soft bread dough.
Let it rise over night; knead in the morning early, let it rise in a flat buttered tin. Rub butter over the top, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake for twenty to thirty minutes. Cut in squares and serve hot with coffee.- A. L.
A plain overnight yeast cake of the kind that fills the bread chapters of turn-of-the-century American books. The instructions assume you know what a soft bread dough feels like, and give neither flour quantity nor oven heat.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. Scalding was standard practice with raw milk; with pasteurized milk you can simply warm it to lukewarm, around 100F.
- A quarter of a yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes of the period varied in size (the familiar small cake was about 0.6 oz), so a quarter is on the order of a teaspoon of fresh yeast, or roughly half a teaspoon of active dry. The small amount suits a long overnight rise.
- Flour enoughExpect about 2 1/2 to 3 cups of all-purpose flour for one cup of milk. Stop while the dough is still slightly tacky; a stiff dough will not rise properly on so little yeast.
- Rising overnightLeave it somewhere cool rather than warm, ideally 60-65F or the refrigerator. In a warm kitchen this small quantity of yeast may over-ferment, leaving the morning dough sour and slack.
- The flat buttered tinAn 8- or 9-inch square pan suits this quantity, giving a cake about an inch thick. Press the dough out to the corners and let it rise until it looks puffed and no longer springs back firmly.
- Oven heatNone is given. Around 375F browns the sugar topping in the twenty to thirty minutes stated; hotter and the cinnamon sugar may scorch before the crumb sets.
- The toppingSoftened rather than melted butter dabbed over the risen dough, then roughly two tablespoons of sugar to a teaspoon of cinnamon. Melted butter runs off the sides and pools in the pan.
- YieldAbout nine generous squares from an 8-inch pan. It is at its best within a few hours of baking, as the instruction to serve hot suggests.
What American cookbooks of this period call German coffee cake descends from the Kaffeekuchen and Butterkuchen brought by nineteenth-century German immigration: a lightly enriched yeast dough pressed flat, dressed with butter, sugar and cinnamon, and eaten with coffee rather than as dessert. The name records the occasion, not an ingredient, and the form descends from the sheet-pan Blechkuchen still sold in German bakeries, as do the streusel-topped coffee cakes of later American baking. Before chemical leavening took over the sweet-baking repertoire, a cake like this was simply bread dough given a richer treatment, and the overnight rise on a quarter cake of yeast fits a household that set dough at bedtime and baked before breakfast. The initials 'A. L.' at the end mark it as a contributed receipt.