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Quick Coffee Cake (C milk C flour level t baking)
1 egg, beaten light. 1/2 C milk 1¾ C flour 3 level t baking powder Julia Price. 1 C sugar 14 C shortening Sprinkle top with sugar and cinnamon. 2 C flour Pinch salt
A plain single-layer coffee cake of the kind kept in a church-supper repertoire: sugar, shortening, milk, flour, baking powder, and a cinnamon-sugar top. The list as printed is inconsistent, so read it as a framework rather than a formula.
- The flour is ambiguousFlour appears twice, once as "2 C" and once as a figure that could be either 1/4 cup or 1 1/4 cups. The shortening is printed the same way ("14 C") and is equally uncertain. A batter of this type built on 1/2 cup milk and a quarter-cup of fat will take about 2 cups of flour in total; more than that gives a dry, scone-like crumb.
- No egg is listedMany quick coffee cakes of this type include an egg for structure and colour, though eggless versions were printed too. Its absence here may be an omission in the printing; without an egg the crumb is likely to be paler and to crumble when cut warm.
- Leavening runs highThree level teaspoons of baking powder for roughly 2 cups of flour is at the upper limit of normal practice (1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons per cup), on the reading that the second flour entry is a quarter-cup. Older powders were commonly single-acting and behaved differently from today's double-acting brands, and a modern one at this rate can leave a soapy edge and a domed, cracked top.
- ShorteningIn a 1900s-1930s community cookbook this means lard or a solid vegetable fat. Butter substitutes cleanly at the same volume and improves the flavour; cream it with the sugar before adding milk and dry ingredients alternately.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Quick coffee cakes of this size bake in a moderate oven, 350-375F, for 25 to 30 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean and the edges pull from the pan.
- Pan and yieldThis quantity of batter suits an 8-inch square or 9-inch round pan, greased, and serves eight to nine. In a larger pan it bakes thin and dries out.
- The toppingSprinkle the cinnamon sugar over the batter just before it goes in, not on the raw batter left to stand, or the sugar dissolves and sinks. Roughly 2 tablespoons sugar to 1 teaspoon cinnamon is the usual proportion.
Community cookbooks like this one were often compiled by church societies as fundraisers, each contributor sending in a favourite under her own name, which may be why "Julia Price" sits in the middle of the ingredients. The recipes were printed as submitted and assumed a great deal: a cook who already knew to cream fat with sugar, to alternate milk and dry ingredients, and what a moderate oven felt like. "Quick" in the title marks it as chemically leavened rather than yeast-risen, a distinction that mattered when a yeast coffee cake meant hours of proving; commercial baking powder made a cake that could be mixed after breakfast and served at a mid-morning gathering. Cinnamon-sugar tops over a plain butter cake batter are the common ancestor of the streusel-topped coffee cakes that followed.