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Crumb Cake (Scant C shortening t baking)
2 C flour 1 C light brown sugar 1 scant C shortening 1 t baking powder 1 t soda in milk Mix above ingredients as for pie, reserving ¾ C for top. To the remainder add 1 egg 1 C sour milk Beat hard and put in a square pan. Sprinkle the ¾ C crumbs over top and bake in hot oven.
Mrs. Bert Steir.
This is a rubbed-crumb coffee cake of the Pennsylvania-Dutch type, and the page has come through in poor shape: the ingredient list is scrambled, the flour and sugar are missing from it, and a stray list from a neighbouring recipe has been swept up at the end. It is workable if you know the form, but you are reconstructing rather than following.
- The missing flour and sugarA crumb cake of this size normally takes about 2 cups flour and 1 cup sugar rubbed into the shortening. Neither appears in the list as printed, so any amount here is inference, not what Mrs. Steir wrote.
- "34 C" means 3/4 cup"34 C" is almost certainly 3/4 cup, the fraction slash having been lost somewhere between the handwritten card and the printed page. Three-quarters of a cup of the rubbed crumb mixture is held back for the topping.
- The stray tailThe final line — 4 T sugar, 1/2 C butter, 1 C milk, 2 eggs — does not fit this cake, which already calls for 1 egg and 1 cup sour milk. Treat it as bleed-over from the recipe printed alongside and ignore it.
- "Mix as for pie"Cut the shortening into the dry ingredients until the mixture is the texture of coarse meal, as for pastry. This is the hinge: overwork it into a paste and you lose both the crumb topping and the tender crumb of the cake.
- Hot ovenIn a book of this period a hot oven is 400–425F. For a square cake in a 8- or 9-inch pan, 375–400F is closer to what actually works; check at 25 minutes and expect 30–35 in total.
- Soda in the sour milkStirring the teaspoon of soda into the sour milk rather than into the flour is a common instruction in recipes of this kind. It starts reacting at once, so get the batter into the pan and into the oven without delay.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk. Cultured buttermilk is the direct substitute; a cup of fresh milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar will also do, though it is thinner.
- YieldThe recipe specifies only 'a square pan'; an 8-inch square, cut into nine pieces, is a reasonable assumption rather than anything stated. Best eaten warm the day it is baked.
Crumb cake -- Streuselkuchen in its German-speaking ancestry -- is associated with Pennsylvania-Dutch and later Midwestern German households, where the same rubbed mixture of fat, flour and sugar could serve twice: bound with soured milk and egg for the cake, scattered dry over the top for the crust. Sour milk and soda leavening of this kind was common in farm kitchens where a crock of milk turned on its own. Compiled community books of this sort were typically typed and set from handwritten cards, which may be why a contributor's recipe can arrive with its flour missing and a neighbour's ingredients stuck to the end.