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Coffee Cakes
Boil until soft one pound of rice, mixing with it two pounds of flour and half a pound of fine cornmeal, a teacupful of fresh yeast, and moisten with cold water. Let the dough rise over night, then make into small cakes and bake on a well-buttered baking-sheet.
A lean, old-fashioned yeast bun rather than anything a modern reader would recognise as coffee cake. The recipe omits salt, sugar, temperature and time, so a few decisions have to be made before you start.
- "Coffee cakes" means cakes to eat with coffeeThere is no sugar, butter or cinnamon in the dough. These are plain breakfast rolls of the kind served alongside coffee, not the sweet crumb-topped cake the term now describes.
- The yeast measure is genuinely ambiguous"A teacupful of fresh yeast" points to a liquid ferment (homemade barm or brewer's/distiller's yeast) rather than a solid cake, and a teacupful in this period could be reckoned anywhere from about 4 to 8 fl oz. There is no honest one-to-one conversion; if you use commercial yeast, dose it for the flour weight rather than trying to match the volume.
- Add saltTwo pounds of flour with no salt at all will taste flat and the gluten will be slack. About 2 teaspoons per pound of flour is standard and does not change the character of the dough.
- Cook the rice soft and use it warm, not hotOne pound of dry rice boiled soft is a great deal of cooked starch, and it is what makes these cakes moist and tender. Let it cool to blood heat before it meets the yeast, or you will kill the ferment.
- Moisten sparinglyThe wet rice supplies most of the liquid. Add cold water a little at a time; the target is a soft, slightly sticky dough you can still shape, not a batter.
- Overnight rise means a cool roomThe instruction dates from kitchens where an unheated pantry was the norm, not a heated modern one. In a warm kitchen the dough may overproof and sour by morning; a cooler spot or the refrigerator gets you closer.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Small plain yeast cakes of this size want a fairly quick oven, about 400-425F, for 15 to 20 minutes until well browned on the bottom.
- YieldTwo pounds of flour plus the rice and cornmeal makes a very large batch, on the order of three to four dozen small cakes. Halve or quarter it for a household.
Rice bread and rice rolls were a standing feature of nineteenth-century American baking, valued because boiled rice stretched wheat flour and kept the crumb moist for days. The addition of fine cornmeal is a further economy and a distinctly American one. Reliance on "fresh yeast" -- a live liquid barm kept going or bought by the cupful -- was still normal at the turn of the century, though compressed cake yeast was by then widely available.