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Olympic Dinner Dishes
Dutch Apple Cake Separate 2 eggs-add to yolks 11/½ cups milk 1 2 3 tablespoon melted butter 1/2 teaspoon salt-mix, add cups Olympic Flour teaspoons baking powder Beat quickly; fold in beaten whites.
Bake in well greased shallow pan. Cover top thickly with pared, cored and quartered apples. Dust over all 1 cup sugar. Bake half hour.
A promotional flour-company recipe, and the numerals have been scrambled in the original printing, so read the quantities carefully before you start. What follows is a plain reading of a standard baking-powder batter cake of the period.
- The garbled measurementsThe ingredient list as printed runs its numbers together: "11/½ cups milk" and "1 2 3 tablespoon melted butter" with the flour and baking powder amounts detached from their numerals. A conventional cake of this type would use about 1½ cups milk, 3 tablespoons melted butter, 2 cups flour and 3 teaspoons baking powder, but the original is genuinely ambiguous and those figures are inference, not the text.
- Olympic FlourA regional brand flour milled in the Pacific Northwest and the reason this book exists. Plain all-purpose flour is the substitute; the batter is forgiving.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as is common in recipes of this kind. For a batter cake of this depth 375F works; check at the half hour the recipe specifies and give it up to 40 minutes if the apples are thick.
- "Shallow pan"A 9x13-inch pan, or a 9-inch square if you want a deeper cake and a longer bake. The batter should sit no more than an inch deep so the apples reach through to it.
- Setting the applesThe original says only to cover the top thickly. In practice, pressing the quartered apples cut side down into the wet batter, close together and standing slightly on edge, helps them hold their shape instead of sliding off as the cake rises.
- A cup of sugarThat is a heavy dusting by modern taste, and it is doing two jobs: sweetening tart storage apples and forming a crust as it melts. Half a cup with cinnamon is nearer current practice, and firm tart apples such as Granny Smith or Braeburn hold up best.
- Folding the whitesThe whites are the only lift beyond the baking powder, so fold them in and get the pan into the oven without delay. 'Beat quickly' most likely refers to working fast rather than beating hard, though the original does not say.
- YieldRoughly eight to ten servings if baked in a 9x13 pan. Best warm, the same day; it is a breakfast and coffee cake rather than a keeper.
Dutch apple cake in American cookbooks of this era is generally reckoned a Pennsylvania German dish rather than a Dutch one, 'Dutch' here reflecting the old English use of the word for German speakers (Deutsch) -- a quick baking-powder batter with fruit pressed into the top, related to German Apfelkuchen and to the various apple Kuchen that traveled with German-speaking settlers. It belongs to the age of chemical leavening: by 1900 commercial baking powder had made a cake like this a thirty-minute proposition rather than a yeasted one, which is part of why a flour miller wanted it in a promotional book. Books of this kind were given away or sold cheaply by mills and grocers, every recipe naming the brand, and they are a useful record of what regional flour companies thought a household would actually cook.