Apple Cake
1 1/2 cups flour 3 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons shortening 1/4 cup milk 4 or 5 apples 1/2 cup sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon Sift together flour, baking powder and salt; add shortening and rub in very lightly; add milk and mix. Place dough on floured board and roll out 1/2 inch thick. Put into shallow greased pan. Wash, pare, core and cut apples into sections; press them into dough; sprinkle with sugar and dust with cinnamon. Bake in moderate oven 30 minutes or until apples are tender and brown. Serve warm with milk or cream.
This is a biscuit dough pressed flat, studded with apple and baked — closer to a German Apfelkuchen or a shortcake than to a layer cake. The two things to watch are the liquid and the leavening.
- The milk is scantA quarter cup of milk to 1 1/2 cups flour gives a very stiff, crumbly dough that will fight the rolling pin. Add milk a tablespoon at a time until it just holds together — you may well need 1/3 to 1/2 cup, depending on the flour.
- Cut the baking powderThree teaspoons to 1 1/2 cups flour reflects the weaker, single-acting powders of the period and the fact that this is an advertising book for Royal. Modern double-acting powder does the same work at 1 1/2 to 2 teaspoons; the full amount can leave a metallic aftertaste.
- Moderate oven350F. Give it 375F if you want more colour on the apple edges, and expect 30 to 40 minutes — the dough should be dry at the centre when tested.
- ShorteningAny solid fat: butter, lard or vegetable shortening. Keep it cold and rub it in only until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs, exactly as for biscuits. Overworking it makes the base tough.
- Pan sizeNone is given. A greased 8- or 9-inch square pan or a 9-inch pie plate suits this quantity of dough at 1/2 inch thick.
- Pressing in the applesCut the sections thin, about 1/4 inch, and set them on edge in rows, pressing until they are half-buried. Thick wedges will still be firm when the dough is done. A firm cooking apple holds its shape best.
- Sugar and spiceHalf a cup of sugar over the top is generous by modern taste for a tart apple and can pool and scorch at the pan edges. Toss the apple slices in the sugar and cinnamon instead, or hold back a couple of tablespoons.
- YieldSix modest squares. It is meant to be eaten warm the day it is made — poured over with cold milk or cream, as directed, it does not need any other sauce.
The New Royal Cook Book was one of a long series of promotional booklets issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which routinely named its own product in recipes that called for leavening. That explains both the brand-name ingredient and the heavy hand with it. The dish itself belongs to an older, broader sense of the word cake — any flat thing baked in a pan, not necessarily a creamed batter — and its method is pure biscuit dough. Fruit pressed into a sweet or plain dough this way is a very old northern European habit, generally traced to the German and Austrian Kuchen tradition that arrived in American home baking through immigrant households in the nineteenth century, and it survives in the American kitchen as apple or plum cake, buckle, and shortcake.