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Coffee Cake
2 cups flour 1/2 teaspoon salt 3 tablespoons sugar 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 2 tablespoons shortening 2/3 cup milk Mix and sift dry ingredients; add melted shortening and enough milk to make very stiff batter. Spread 1/2 inch thick in greased pan; add top mixture. Bake about 30 minutes in moderate oven.
A plain quick-bread base from a baking powder company's promotional booklet, written for cooks who already knew what belonged on top. Two things need attention before you start: the missing topping and the leavening.
- The "top mixture" is not given herePresumably a companion entry elsewhere in the book. A common topping of the period is a rubbed crumb of roughly 1/2 cup flour, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/4 cup butter and a teaspoon of cinnamon, scattered over the batter before baking. Without it this is a sweetened biscuit slab.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F. The recipe says about 30 minutes; at 1/2 inch thick start checking at 25, and a shade earlier if your pan is dark metal.
- Pan sizeTwo cups of flour spread half an inch deep wants roughly an 8-inch square or a 9-inch round. Anything smaller gives a thick, doughy centre; anything much larger and it bakes into a cracker.
- Baking powder has changedRoyal in this era was a cream-of-tartar (tartrate) powder, single-acting and fast: it began working the moment the milk went in. Modern double-acting powder holds part of its lift for the oven, so 4 teaspoons for 2 cups of flour is on the generous side today. Three teaspoons gives a cleaner flavour.
- ShorteningMeans any solid fat — lard, butter or a vegetable shortening. Melted butter is the best choice for flavour here, and the recipe already calls for it melted rather than rubbed in.
- "Very stiff batter"Thicker than a pourable cake batter, closer to a soft drop biscuit dough that has to be pushed into the pan with a spatula or floured fingers. The 2/3 cup of milk is a starting point; the instruction to add "enough milk" acknowledges that flour absorbency varies.
- Work quicklyOnce liquid meets the powder the reaction starts. Mix, spread, top and get it into a preheated oven without pausing.
- YieldEight to nine squares. Best warm the day it is baked; it stales fast, as all lean quick breads do.
This appears to come from a booklet published to sell Royal Baking Powder, which would explain why the leavening is named as a brand and measured with a heavy hand. "Coffee cake" here has nothing to do with coffee as an ingredient — it is the German Kaffeekuchen tradition, a plain sweetened bread eaten alongside coffee, generally said to have been carried into American kitchens by German immigrants through the nineteenth century and gradually detached from its yeasted origins. The yeast-risen versions took hours; chemical leavening turned the same idea into something a cook could start after breakfast was cleared and serve before noon. Company cookbooks like this one were a major vehicle for that shift, offering free or near-free recipes that happened to require several teaspoons of the sponsor's product.