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German Rings
Augusta Simmers.
One-half pound of flour, one-half pound butter, one tablespoon sugar, one tablespoon brandy, two eggs; beat all together; make them in rings and put cinnamon and sugar on the top.
A short-dough cookie of the German bakery type, written for cooks who already knew what the dough should feel like. Two things are missing from the text: an oven temperature and a shaping method.
- Weights to volumeHalf a pound of flour is about 1¾ cups (227 g); half a pound of butter is two sticks. That is an unusually high proportion of fat to flour, which is what makes these tender and short rather than crisp.
- OvenThe recipe gives no oven direction at all. A moderate oven suits so rich a dough; in modern terms roughly 350F for twelve to fifteen minutes, until the rings are set and just colouring at the edges — the pale interior is correct.
- Chill the doughWith two whole eggs and that much butter the mixture is too soft to shape when freshly beaten. An hour in the refrigerator makes it workable; if it is still slack, roll ropes and join the ends rather than trying to cut rings.
- No leavening, and none intendedThere is no saleratus, baking powder or ammonia here. The rings should not puff; they spread slightly and hold their shape, so leave an inch between them on the sheet.
- The brandyA tablespoon in this quantity of dough is for flavour and a little tenderness, not lift. Any decent brandy or Cognac works; most of the alcohol cooks off.
- Cinnamon sugar on topSprinkle it before baking, not after — the surface of an unbaked butter dough is tacky enough to hold it, while a baked one is not. Roughly one teaspoon of cinnamon to two tablespoons of sugar.
- YieldAbout two and a half to three dozen rings of two inches across. They keep about a week in a tin.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago; first published 1874, with further printings later in the decade) was assembled from contributions by named local women, which is why this page reads simply "Augusta Simmers" — the recipe carries her name the way a church-supper dish carries its cook's. Chicago in the 1870s had one of the largest German-speaking populations in the country, and the book's German entries reflect that: rings, kringel and cinnamon-sugared short doughs of this kind belong to a broad family of northern European Spritzgebäck and Zimtkringel, piped or hand-rolled rather than cut with a stamp. The brevity is characteristic: contributors tended to set down proportions with little method.