Bread: German
1 cupful sugar, 1/2 teaspoonful nutmeg, 1/4 teaspoonful salt, 1/2 cupful raisins, Kreuznach Horns (German recipe). 4 cupfuls flour, 1 yeast cake, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, 2 eggs, cupful water, 1/4 cupful milk, teaspoonful salt.
Set a sponge with 2 cupfuls flour with the yeast cake and milk. When it rises, make into a dough with the rest of the flour, adding the butter, sugar, eggs, and salt. Let it rise again. Roll it out into pieces six inches square and quite thin. Cut each square into four triangles, brush with melted butter, dust lightly with flour, roll up from the wide side, letting the point of the triangle come on top and bend around in the form of a horseshoe. Put them to rise în MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK a greased pan when ready to bake, brush over with milk, and bake in a hot oven.
Raised Doughnuts. 2 cupfuls bread dough, 1/4 cupful sugar, 1/4 tablespoonful melted butter, teaspoonful nutmeg, 2 eggs, Flour.
When the dough for a baking of bread rises the last time in the pan and is kneaded out on the board, cut off a piece large enough to fill a pint measure, put in a bowl, add all the ingredients called for in the recipe and work them into the spongy mass, sifting in flour as needed to make it of a consistency that can be rolled. When thoroughly blended, turn it out on the board, sift with flour, and roll about three quarters of an inch thick. Cut into fingers or rings with a doughnut cutter and spread them out on the board to rise. When puffy, fry in boiling fat, turning so they will be browned all over. Drain from the kettle and toss immediately in powdered sugar.
A favorite breakfast in New England is the bread dough, taken without any addition of sugar, eggs, or spices, cut into strips, raised, and fried like doughnuts, then eaten hot with maple sirup.
German Coffee Cake. 1 egg, 1 cupful milk, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 3 tablespoonfuls sugar, 1 yeast cake, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful cinnamon, cupful raisins, 1 cupful shaved citron, Flour.
Scald the milk, pour it over the butter, sugar, and salt. When lukewarm, add the dissolved yeast and enough flour to make a soft dough; beat the mixture hard; let it rise over night. In the morning add the beaten egg and the fruit, also a little more flour if necessary, and knead for a few minutes. Shape the dough into a ring, put in a greased pie plate, and set to rise. Before putting into the oven, brush the top with melted butter, and sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar. Bake half an hour.
Three yeast-raised recipes printed as a block, with the page's running head ("MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK") accidentally set into the middle of the first one. Fractions have dropped out of the ingredient lists in several places, so read the quantities against the methods before you start.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake was a small cake of compressed yeast; the standard modern compressed cake is 0.6 oz, though period sizes varied. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast in each recipe.
- Missing butter in the HornsThe method for Kreuznach Horns calls for butter that never appears in the ingredient list. Around 4 tablespoons worked into the dough is consistent with an enriched roll of this type, plus more melted for brushing the triangles.
- The water is a phantomA cupful of water is listed for the Horns but never used. The sponge is set with milk alone and the dough comes together without it; leave it out rather than trying to work it in.
- Lost fractions"Cupful raisins" and "cupful shaved citron" in the coffee cake, and "teaspoonful salt" and "teaspoonful nutmeg" elsewhere, have almost certainly lost a leading 1/2. A full cup each of raisins and citron will overwhelm the ring; half a cup of each is in scale.
- Hot ovenFor the Horns, the book's "hot oven" reads as about 425F. The German Coffee Cake is given no oven heat at all, only "bake half an hour"; a moderate 350F is the safer reading, since a hot oven would set the crust before the enriched, fruited crumb cooked through.
- Boiling fatFor the raised doughnuts, hold the fat at 365-375F. Below that they soak; above, the outside colours before the yeasted interior is done. They fry faster than cake doughnuts, roughly a minute a side.
- Shaping the hornsRoll the squares genuinely thin, near 1/8 inch, and stretch the triangle slightly as you roll it from the base. The character comes from the butter and flour dusting caught between the rolled-up layers, so do not skip the flour.
- CitronCandied citron peel is still sold, usually diced rather than shaved. If using diced, toss it in a little of the flour so it does not sink through the soft dough.
- YieldApproximate: the Horns give about two dozen; the coffee cake is a single ring baked in a pie plate, serving eight; the doughnut recipe, taken from a pint of bread dough, makes roughly a dozen and a half.
Kreuznach — now Bad Kreuznach, a Rhineland spa town on the Nahe. The horn itself is a Hörnchen, the crescent roll found across German-speaking Europe and generally held to be related to the Viennese kipfel that stands behind the croissant; the rolled triangle bent into a horseshoe is the usual method. The raised doughnut here is not a separate batter at all but a pinch of the day's bread dough enriched with sugar, egg and nutmeg, and the note about New England breakfast strips fried plain and eaten with maple syrup records a plainer version of the same habit.