Home › Bread › Dutch Apple Cake
Dutch Apple Cake
Use rule for Egg Muffins. Spread mixture one half inch thick on buttered pans. Lay apples cut into eighths in two rows on top of dough. Sprinkle with sugar; bake in hot oven thirty minutes. Serve with lemon sauce or as a tea cake. 1 cup corn meal 1 cup flour 1/4 cup sugar 1 cup milk
A cross-reference recipe: the batter comes from the book's Egg Muffins, and the trailing list of four ingredients is a variation rather than a complete formula. A few things need pinning down before you start.
- The ingredient list is incompleteThe four items given — 1 cup corn meal, 1 cup flour, 1/4 cup sugar, 1 cup milk — carry no egg, fat or leavening, all of which a muffin batter of this kind would normally include. They read as a substitution note for the Egg Muffins rule rather than a standalone recipe; you need the muffin recipe itself to make this.
- "Hot oven"In American books of this period a hot oven is generally reckoned somewhere around 400–450F, though the figure varies from book to book. At half an inch thick with thirty minutes of baking, the lower end is safer; the cake will colour fast once the sugar on the apples begins to caramelise.
- Half an inch of batterThis is a sheet, not a loaf. Butter the pan generously — the apple juices and sugar will weld to bare metal.
- The applesThe recipe says only to lay the eighths on top of the dough in two rows; it does not mention peeling or pressing them in. A firm cooking apple that holds its shape is wanted; a soft eating apple collapses into the crumb in thirty minutes at that heat.
- Sprinkling with sugarDo this after the apples are set in place, over the fruit rather than the dough, and add a little cinnamon if you like — the book's restraint here is typical, not obligatory.
- Lemon sauceLemon sauces of the period are typically a thickened syrup — water, sugar, cornstarch or flour, butter, lemon juice and rind, cooked until clear. It is served warm and poured over the cut squares.
- YieldA standard muffin quantity baked this way gives roughly nine to twelve squares. It is best the day it is made; the cornmeal in the variation dries quickly.
Dutch apple cake in American cookbooks of this era is often said to be Pennsylvania Dutch — that is, Deutsch, German — and is traditionally traced to the family of Apfelkuchen in which apple wedges are pressed into a soft dough rather than folded through a batter. The version here belongs squarely to the bread chapter: it is a muffin mixture spread flat and dressed with fruit, the sort of thing turned out for supper or afternoon tea rather than presented as a dessert, which is why the book offers lemon sauce and "or as a tea cake" as alternatives. Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and alongside its promotional confectionery pages it carries a full run of ordinary household recipes, including the heavy reliance on cross-references — "use rule for Egg Muffins" — that runs through the book.