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Liberty Coffee Cake
Scald and cool to lukewarm half a pint of milk; add one heaping tablespoon of butter and two of sugar, a quarter of a yeast cake dissolved in a little warm water, a speck of salt, and flour enough to make a soft bread dough. Let rise over night; knead in the morning early.
Let it rise in a flat buttered tin. Rub butter over the top; sprinkle with sugar and cinnamon and bake for twenty to thirty minutes. Cut in squares and serve hot, with coffee.
A plain overnight yeast cake with a butter-sugar-cinnamon top. The original gives no oven temperature and no flour quantity, which is where most of the guesswork lies.
- Half a pint of milkOne cup. Scalding was standard with raw milk, and is usually explained as denaturing whey proteins that weaken gluten; with modern pasteurized milk it is generally held to be unnecessary, though warming to lukewarm still matters for the yeast.
- A quarter of a yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes of the period varied in size, commonly somewhere between half an ounce and an ounce, so a quarter cake is on the order of a teaspoon of fresh yeast — roughly half a teaspoon of active dry. The small quantity suits a slow overnight rise at room temperature rather than a fast one.
- Flour enough for a soft doughExpect 2 1/2 to 3 cups. Aim for a dough that is slack and slightly tacky rather than firm; a stiff dough here bakes dry and bready instead of tender.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, in the region of 350-375F, is a reasonable modern choice for the stated twenty to thirty minutes in a shallow pan.
- A flat buttered tinA 9-inch square pan suits this quantity. The dough should be pressed out to about half an inch and left to rise in the pan until puffy, roughly 45 minutes to an hour in a warm kitchen.
- The toppingSoften the butter and dab or spread it rather than trying to rub cold butter over a risen, gassy dough, which will deflate it. Dimpling the surface with your fingertips first holds the sugar and cinnamon in pockets.
- Overnight riseKitchens of the period were often cooler overnight than a modern heated house. In a warm house the dough may overproof and sour by morning; the refrigerator overnight is the safer course, letting it come back to room temperature before kneading.
- YieldNine to twelve squares from a 9-inch pan. It is at its best within an hour of baking and stales fairly quickly.
The name may point to the recipe's era. During the First World War a wave of patriotic renaming swept American kitchens and menus — sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, hamburger became liberty steak, and the German-style Kaffeekuchen, a butter-and-cinnamon-topped yeast cake carried to the United States by German immigrants through the nineteenth century, turned up on printed pages as liberty coffee cake. The label is not proof of a straight renaming, though, since during the war "Liberty" also attached to wheat-conservation breads. What appears here is recognizably the sweetened overnight bread dough that German-American households had been baking for decades, and it kept the German habit of eating it warm and cut in squares alongside coffee rather than as a dessert.