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Quick Coffee Cake (C sweet milk egg T melted)
1/2 C sugar. 2 C flour. 1/2 t salt. 1 C sweet milk 1 egg 1 T melted butter 1 heaping t baking powder 1 C stewed seedless raisins Sprinkle a mixture of cinnamon and sugar over the top and bits of butter, before sliding into oven. Bake about 20 minutes. Dorothy Algie Black.
Note: Mrs. Geo. Ives omits the raisins and uses 1 C sugar.
A community-cookbook shorthand recipe that assumes the cook already knows the proportions. As printed it is missing at least one essential ingredient, so read the notes before you start.
- The missing flourNo flour is listed, yet the batter is meant to be poured and baked. Comparable one-cup-of-milk quick cakes of the period run about 2 cups flour to 1 cup milk; the original gives no figure, so any amount you use is a reconstruction, not the recipe.
- The missing sugarThe main list has no sugar at all, only the cinnamon-sugar topping. Mrs. Ives's note — 1 cup sugar in place of the raisins — suggests the base was expected to be sweetened somehow, and that the stewed raisins were carrying the sweetness in the first version.
- Baking powderOne heaping teaspoon for a cup of milk is light by modern standards, and early-century baking powder was often single-acting. Get it into the oven promptly once mixed.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, as opposed to the buttermilk or clabbered milk called for elsewhere in these books. Whole milk is the closest match.
- AbbreviationsC is cup, T tablespoon, t teaspoon. One tablespoon of melted butter is about 14 g — a very lean batter, which is why the bits of butter go on top.
- Stewed seedless raisinsRaisins simmered in a little water until plump and soft, then drained. Do not add the stewing liquid; it will thin the batter.
- Oven and panNo temperature is given; home cooks judged the oven themselves and the book supplies no oven term to translate. Twenty minutes suggests a fairly brisk oven and a shallow pan; around 375F in a shallow square pan is a workable modern guess, but it is a guess. A deep pan will need longer.
- YieldA cup of milk makes a single small coffee cake, six to nine squares.
Church and society cookbooks like this one were compiled from cards and dictation, and the contributors wrote for neighbors who baked the same things every week — which is how a coffee cake gets published with no flour in it. The name is literal: not a cake containing coffee but a plain sweetened bread to be eaten alongside it, a habit brought into American kitchens largely by German and Scandinavian settlers and firmly domestic by the early twentieth century. The double attribution — Dorothy Algie Black's version with stewed raisins, Mrs. Geo. Ives's plainer sugar version — is characteristic of these books, where two women's variants of the same household staple were printed side by side rather than reconciled.