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Krummel Torte
Signa E. Nelson. 1/2 lb. dates, cut fine ½ lb. walnuts, chopped ½ lb. sugar 6 eggs 3 T bread crumbs 1 t baking powder (heaping) Beat yolks and add to other ingredients. Beat whites and fold in. Bake in shallow pan slowly about forty minutes. When cold crumble and serve with whipped cream.
Mabel Andrews. 3 eggs 1 C brown sugar 1 C walnuts
A flourless nut-and-date torte held together by eggs and a spoonful of breadcrumbs, baked flat and then deliberately broken up. Read the quantities carefully before you shop.
- The proportions are almost certainly mistypedThe proportions look suspect -- 1½ lb of walnuts and 1½ lb of sugar against six eggs and three tablespoons of crumbs makes a very heavy, wet mixture for the quantity of egg binding it, and ½ lb is an easy misreading of 1½ lb in this kind of typesetting. If the printed weights give you a pan of sweet nut gravel rather than a sheet that crumbles, try the ½ lb reading instead.
- Weights into cupsWeights into cups (for the ½ lb reading suggested above) -- Half a pound of chopped walnuts is about 2 cups; half a pound of granulated sugar is about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons; half a pound of dates, pitted and cut fine, is roughly 1½ cups packed. The printed recipe as it stands asks for three times the walnuts and sugar.
- "Slowly" means 300-325F"Slowly" -- No temperature is given. Read conventionally, a slow bake of this period is somewhere around 300-325F, and the lower end is the safer choice: the sugar and dates scorch readily, and forty minutes in a hot oven will give you a dark crust over a wet middle.
- Shallow panAny shallow sheet pan, greased, will do; something around 9x13 inches gives a thin enough sheet. Anything deeper risks staying custardy in the centre and will not crumble cleanly.
- No flour at allThe three tablespoons of breadcrumbs and the beaten whites are the entire structure. Use dry, fine crumbs rather than fresh, and fold the whites in with a light hand -- the torte is meant to be airy enough to break apart under a spoon.
- Cut the dates with a wet knifeWhole pitted dates clump into a single mass in the batter. Chop them small, toss them with a spoonful of the measured sugar so the pieces stay separate, then fold them through.
- The serving is the pointCool it completely in the pan, then crumble it coarsely into glasses or a bowl and spoon over softly whipped cream. As written it is served as crumbs with cream rather than in slices, so assemble it shortly before serving or the crumbs soften.
- YieldScaled to the ½ lb reading, a shallow sheet pan of this should serve roughly eight as a crumbled dessert.
- The second recipe is incompleteMabel Andrews's entry breaks off after three eggs, a cup of brown sugar and a cup of walnuts. No method or further ingredients are given, for whatever reason, and it cannot be made as printed.
The name points to German Krummel (usually spelled Krümel), meaning crumb. Tortes built on ground nuts and beaten eggs rather than flour reached American community cookbooks through Central European baking, where the technique was long ordinary, and the three tablespoons of breadcrumbs here do the work a cup of flour would otherwise do. What distinguishes this one is that the baker is instructed to wreck it: the sheet is baked, cooled and broken up, and served with cream. Dates and walnuts together were both cheap and widely available by the early twentieth century, and turn up repeatedly in fundraiser-book dessert chapters.