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Crumb Cake
Evelyn Petrie.
Rub ½ Clard with 2 C flour, add 1 C sugar. 1 t each of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves. Take out one cup of mixture. In the remainder, add 1 egg, 2 T molasses, 1 C sour milk, with 1 level t baking soda, and a pinch of salt.
Beat up good and put in sheet tins. Sprinkle the cup of dry mixture over the cake and bake in moderate oven for 30 minutes. . 2 C flour 1 C light brown sugar Mrs. C. I. Casey.
A plain crumb-topped coffee cake of the sort church books collected by the dozen. The typesetting has suffered: "Rub 12 Clard" is rub 1/2 cup lard, and the stray "2 C flour 1 C light brown sugar Mrs. C. I. Casey" at the end belongs to the next recipe on the page, not to this one.
- The hingeThe reserved cup of dry flour-sugar-spice-fat mixture is the whole point of the cake. Rub the lard into the flour and sugar until it looks like coarse meal, pull out a full cup before any liquid goes in, and it will bake into a crisp streusel lid.
- Lard, and what to use insteadHalf a cup of lard rubs in cleanly and gives a short, tender crumb. Butter or shortening works at the same volume; butter will brown the topping faster, so watch the last five minutes.
- Sour milkNot spoiled milk but naturally soured raw milk, mildly acidic. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or add a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar to a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is required to work the soda.
- Soda and molassesOne level teaspoon of baking soda is the only leavener, activated by the sour milk and the molasses. Stir the soda into the milk just before it joins the batter and get the cake into the oven promptly; some of the lift is lost if the batter stands.
- Moderate oven350F. Thirty minutes is right for a shallow sheet.
- "Sheet tins"Not a modern half-sheet pan, which would give a cracker. A 9x13 tin or two 8-inch square tins gives a layer roughly an inch deep, which is what thirty minutes at 350F suits. Test with a skewer in the center.
- SpicingA teaspoon each of nutmeg, cinnamon and cloves is assertive by current taste. Half a teaspoon of cloves gives a gentler result.
- YieldAbout 12 to 15 squares from a 9x13. Best the day it is baked; the crumb top softens overnight.
Crumb cake in American community cookbooks is generally traced to the German Streuselkuchen brought by nineteenth-century immigrants, and its bones show plainly here: fat rubbed into flour and sugar, part of it held back for the top. What marks this as a home version rather than a bakery one is the chemistry. Sour milk and a level teaspoon of soda, with molasses for color and a little extra acid, made a cake that needed no yeast, no waiting, and no eggs beyond one. There is also a double attribution, with Evelyn Petrie's name at the head and Mrs. C. I. Casey's stranded at the foot, though what to make of the stray trailing line is unclear.