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Quick Coffee Cake
1 pint flour. 1-3 cup sugar. 1 teaspoon cinnamon. 1 egg. 1/2 teaspoon salt. 3 level teaspoons baking powder. 1/2 cup sweet milk. 4 tablespoons melted butter.
Sift all dry material twice together. Beat egg, add milk and stir in flour. Add melted butter. Spread in shallow pan, sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake.
A plain chemically-leavened cake, closer to a thick pan biscuit than to today's sour-cream coffee cakes. Two things need settling before you start: the sugar quantity and the missing oven temperature.
- "1-3 cup sugar"Almost certainly a typesetter's rendering of one-third cup. Read it as ⅓ cup, which is right for a batter this size; a full cup would make it a sweet cake rather than the restrained bread this belongs among.
- Flour by the pintVolume measures for dry goods were standard in this period. A pint of sifted flour is 2 cups, about 8 to 9 oz. Sifting twice with the salt, baking powder, cinnamon and sugar is not decorative here — it is the only distribution the leavening gets, since the mixing is minimal.
- Sweet milkPlain unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk or buttermilk that older recipes pair with saleratus. Whole milk is closest to what she meant.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was usual when ranges had no thermostats. Bake at 375°F for 20 to 25 minutes; the cake is thin, and much hotter will set the cinnamon-sugar crust before the centre rises.
- The pan"Shallow" means about an inch of batter — an 8-inch square pan is right. The batter is stiff and will not level itself; push it into the corners with an offset spatula or dampened fingers before topping.
- Butter lastThe melted butter goes in after the flour is already stirred in, so the flour is worked twice. Stop as soon as no dry streaks remain. Overworking at this stage is what turns the cake tough and tunnelled.
- The toppingNo amounts are given. Two tablespoons of sugar with a half teaspoon of cinnamon covers an 8-inch pan; a spoonful of cold butter cut in gives a crumb rather than a crust.
- YieldNine squares from an 8-inch pan. Best the day it is baked — there is little fat or sugar to keep it soft overnight.
"Coffee cake" in American usage does not mean cake made with coffee but cake eaten with it, a sense generally traced to the German Kaffeekuchen brought by nineteenth-century immigrant communities, and one especially at home in Pennsylvania, where Mrs. Wilson wrote and taught. The German original was a yeast dough, raised for hours; "quick" marks this version as the baking-powder descendant, mixed and baked without waiting for a rise. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Ladies' Home Journal and her books came out of the wartime and immediately postwar years, when household economy was a public virtue. The recipe itself is spare: a single egg, a half cup of milk, and no nuts, fruit or filling.