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Apple Cake
4 T sugar. 1/2 C butter. 1 C milk. 2 eggs. 12 t salt 2 t baking powder Flour to roll Place in tins-dot with butter. Pare and quarter apples and place them closely over the cake. Sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon. Bake about 25 minutes. 2 C sour milk
The text as printed is incomplete — it appears to have been set from a garbled or partly dropped ingredient list, with the sour milk stranded at the end and no shortening, sugar or egg quantity given. Read it as a sour-milk biscuit dough pressed into a pan and shingled with apple, and expect to fill in the gaps from a modern short dough.
- The mangled measurements"12 t salt" is most likely 1/2 t salt, a common typesetting loss of the fraction. Two teaspoons of baking powder to two cups of liquid is plausible, though a sour-milk dough of this kind would often have called for soda as well; the printed text gives none.
- Sour milkThis means naturally soured raw milk, thick and acidic. Buttermilk is the standing substitute; two cups of buttermilk, or two cups of whole milk with two tablespoons of lemon juice or vinegar stirred in and left ten minutes.
- Baking powder with sour milkSome period baking powders were single-acting and weaker than today's, and many recipes of the kind paired soda with sour milk, using baking powder alongside it. Modern double-acting powder alone will lift it, though the crumb may taste faintly sour without a little soda to neutralize the milk.
- "Flour to roll"The hinge of the recipe: this is not a poured batter but a dough taken to a stiffness that can be handled and rolled out. Add flour only until it just leaves the bowl before rolling or pressing it into the tins; overflouring turns a tender apple cake into a dry scone.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. For a dough this shallow with raw apple on top, a moderately hot oven of about 400F is a reasonable modern choice; 25 minutes at that heat should set the base and soften the fruit.
- The applesQuartered apples will not cook through in 25 minutes. Pare, core and cut into thin wedges no more than a quarter inch thick, and press the edges down into the dough so they stay put as it rises.
- Pans and yield"Tins" is not specified; any shallow pan will do. Dot the dough with butter before the fruit goes on, as directed. Best eaten warm the day it is baked.
Apple cake of this sort is closer to a kuchen than a layer cake -- the German and Pennsylvania-Dutch habit of pressing a leavened dough into a shallow pan, covering it with fruit and dusting it with sugar and cinnamon. The sour-milk leavening points to a household with its own milk supply: milk that had turned was not waste but a raw material, and pairing it with soda or baking powder was a common way to get lift. Contributor recipes in compiled community books were written down for neighbors who already knew the method, which is one reason oven heat goes unmentioned and why some, like this one, survive only as fragments.