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American Coffee Cake
4 1/2 cups pastry flour 1/2 cup sugar 4 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1 level teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons sugar 2 rounding tablespoons butter or lard 2 eggs 1⅓ cups milk Sift flour, then measure; add baking powder, salt and sugar; sift three times; chop butter in with spoon, beat egg whites with half egg-shell of water added to each until stiff, then add yolks and beat in; add milk and beat all together; turn into two square pans and spread even; brush top with milk. Spread with the following: 1/2 cup flour cup sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 1 tablespoon butter Mix flour, sugar and cinnamon; rub butter in until it is crumbly; spread thick on top of cakes; bake in moderate oven 30 to 35 minutes.
Qualifies Where Quality Calumet Baking Powder is now used in the Army and Navy. Standards are Strictest ity in baking powder, purity in baking and surety of results. Government experts selected Calumet because it meant pur-
A promotional recipe from a baking powder company, printed with at least two quantities missing — the flour for the batter and the fraction on the topping sugar. Both need judgment before you start.
- The missing flourNo flour quantity is given for the batter, which is the recipe's central omission. For 4 teaspoons baking powder, 2 eggs and 1 1/3 cups milk, a batter of this style takes roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups sifted flour; anything less and it pours rather than spreads.
- The topping sugarThe streusel line reads "cup sugar" with the fraction apparently dropped in typesetting. Against 1/2 cup flour and 1 tablespoon butter, 1/2 cup is the likelier proportion; a full cup would be very sweet and more inclined to melt than to stay crumbly.
- Moderate ovenIn period usage roughly 350 to 375F. Two square pans of this batter, if around 8-inch, will take the full 30 to 35 minutes; test the centre with a skewer rather than trusting the clock.
- Rounding tablespoonsA "rounding" tablespoon is heaped just above level, perhaps half again as much as a level spoon; two of them come to something like 2 1/2 to 3 level tablespoons of butter, which makes this a lean cake rather than a rich one.
- The half egg-shell of waterHalf an egg shell holds something on the order of a tablespoon. Adding a little water to whites was a common trick for gaining volume; the whites are less stable for it, so fold them in promptly.
- Chopping the butter in"Chop butter in with spoon" means cutting cold fat into the dry mix until it is in small pieces, not creaming it. The beaten whites, alongside the baking powder, are what lift the crumb.
- Calumet specificallyCalumet was a double-acting powder of the SAS-phosphate type. Any modern double-acting baking powder substitutes at the same measure; 4 teaspoons is on the assertive side, and powders of this kind were often said to leave a faint metallic taste.
- YieldTwo square pans, about 16 to 18 servings cut in squares. Best the day it is baked, as the low fat content makes it dry quickly.
This is advertising copy as much as cookery. The Calumet Baking Powder Company was established in Chicago in 1889 and published small recipe booklets, among them Reliable Recipes, for decades; the closing paragraph about Army and Navy use points to a wartime printing, most plausibly the First World War era, when a government endorsement was a strong selling point for a food manufacturer. The "coffee cake" itself is generally traced to German Kaffeekuchen — a plain sweetened cake eaten with coffee rather than made with it — and the crumb topping is a thinned-out streusel, the flour-sugar-butter rubble associated with Central European bakers in the United States in the nineteenth century.