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Dutch Apple Cake
1 cup scalded milk. 1/3 cup butter. 1/3 cup sugar. 1/3 teaspoon salt. 1 yeast cake. 2 eggs. 2¾ cups flour Melted butter 5 sour apples 1/4 cup sugar ½ teaspoon cinnamon 2 tablespoons currants Mix first four ingredients. When lukewarm add yeast cake, eggs unbeaten, and flour to make a soft dough. Cover, let rise, beat thoroughly, and again let rise. Spread in a buttered dripping-pan as thinly as possible and brush over with melted butter. Pare, cut in eighths, and remove cores from apples.
Press sharp edges of apples into the dough in parallel rows lengthwise of pan. Sprinkle with sugar mixed with cinnamon and sprinkle with currants. Cover, let rise, and bake in a moderate oven thirty minutes. Cut in squares and serve hot or cold with whipped cream sweetened and flavored. SWEDISH TEA RING II BEFORE BAKING. - Page 64.
SWEDISH TEA RING II. - Page 64 RAISED HOMINY MUFFINS. - Page 66.
A yeast-raised apple cake from the bread chapter rather than the cake chapter, closer to German Apfelkuchen than to anything baked with baking powder. Read it as an enriched sweet dough with fruit pressed into it.
- The base to be scalded"Mix first four ingredients" points to ingredients not carried on this page; in this chapter such a base is typically scalded milk with sugar, butter and salt, cooled before the yeast goes in. Yeast is damaged well above blood heat (roughly 130F and up), which is why the recipe insists the mixture be lukewarm first.
- Flour quantityThe flour figure as printed is not a usable number. Work to texture instead: a soft dough that is slack but pulls away from the bowl, roughly 2 3/4 to 3 cups for a cup of liquid.
- Yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake of the period is equivalent to about 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry or instant yeast. Compressed cake yeast is still sold in some markets but is far less common now.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Thirty minutes is right for a thinly spread sheet; the dough should be set and lightly browned at the edges and the apples tender.
- Dripping-panA rimmed sheet or shallow roasting pan; no size is given. Spreading the dough "as thinly as possible" is the point: this is meant to be a thin sweet flatbread carrying fruit, not a thick loaf.
- Sour applesTart firm cooking apples. Granny Smith or a good Baldwin hold their shape; sweet dessert apples collapse into sauce and make the base wet.
- Pressing the applesCutting each apple in eighths and driving the sharp edge down into the dough is what keeps the slices upright as the dough rises around them. Set them close, in rows, or the surface bakes flat and dry between them.
- CurrantsDried Zante currants, not fresh red or black currants. Scatter them after the cinnamon sugar so they sit in the crevices rather than on top, where they scorch.
- Rises and yieldRises -- three in all: bulk, a second after beating down, and a final proof in the pan once the apples are set.
Dutch Apple Cake in American cookbooks of this period is often explained as "Deutsch" rather than Dutch, an etymology frequently repeated though not securely documented; the cakes themselves belong to the family of German fruit-topped yeast cakes, of which Apfelkuchen and the plum-topped Zwetschgenkuchen are the best-known members. Its placement among the raised doughs rather than the cakes follows from the fact that it depends entirely on yeast for lift, and on this page it sits alongside Swedish tea rings and raised hominy muffins. Sour apples were a common keeping apple, sharp enough to want the sprinkling of sugar and cinnamon that finishes the top, and the whipped cream served with it points to tea rather than the bread basket.