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Coffee Cake (Egg well beaten C sugar t)
1 egg, well beaten 12 C sugar 1/2 t cinnamon--little salt 1 C flour 1/2 C milk 1 heaping t baking powder 4 T melted butter Spread in large pie pan, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon, put sliced apples on top, add melted butter, then sprinkle with sugar. 2 T lard 1 egg Mary E. Kern.
A single-layer apple coffee cake typical of a church-supper collection: the batter is a plain one-egg cake thinned enough to spread rather than pour. The transcription has some scrambling that needs sorting out before you start.
- "12 C sugar" is a typo"12 C sugar" is plainly an error -- twelve cups of sugar to one of flour is not a batter. Most likely it stands for 1/2 cup, which is the amount that balances 1 cup of flour, 1 egg and 1/2 cup milk here.
- The trailing "2 T lard, 1 egg"These lines have no place in the method as written and are most likely stray text from an adjacent recipe on the original page. Nothing in the instructions uses them.
- No oven temperature is givenNo oven temperature is given. Bake at 350-375F; a thin cake in a pie pan is done in roughly 25 to 35 minutes, when the centre springs back and the apples have slumped.
- AbbreviationsC is cup, T is tablespoon, t is teaspoon, and the distinction matters most in the 4 T melted butter versus the 1 heaping t baking powder. "Heaping" here means a generous rounded spoon, closer to 1 1/2 level teaspoons.
- "Large pie pan"A 9- or 10-inch pie plate. The batter layer will look alarmingly thin, which is correct for this style; it is closer to a fruit kuchen than to a tall layer cake.
- The applesNo quantity is given; two medium firm apples, peeled and sliced thin, will cover a 9- or 10-inch pan. The recipe puts them on top of the batter. Softer varieties will collapse into sauce.
- Butter and sugar twice overRead the order carefully: sugar and cinnamon on the batter, then apples, then melted butter, then more sugar. The second butter is drizzled over the fruit, and it is what glazes the top.
- YieldEight modest wedges. Best warm the day it is made; the apple layer weeps by the second day.
Coffee cake in an American church cookbook has nothing to do with coffee as an ingredient -- it is cake to be eaten with coffee, a usage generally connected to the German Kaffeekuchen and its close relative the fruit Kuchen, a thin sweet batter or yeast base with fruit on or pressed into the top. This pattern of recipe, quick, one egg, one cup of flour, whatever fruit was to hand, appears again and again in congregational collections. The compressed, abbreviated style is characteristic of the genre: contributors wrote for neighbours who already knew what a moderate oven felt like and how thin to slice an apple, so the book records amounts and leaves technique unsaid. Mary E. Kern's name on the recipe is the whole of its provenance, and that was the point, these books were as much a roster of the congregation as a manual.