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German Supper Cakes
Make a batter with 1 pint hot milk, 1 small cup of yeast, and enough flour to make a dough. Set it to rise overnight, add the next morning 1 cup of sugar, mixed with 1 cup of butter and 2 eggs. Beat all well, and set to rise. Pour into pie plates, adding more flour if needful, and set to rise till light; rub over with 3 tablespoonfuls of cinnamon and sugar mixed, and 1 ounce, butter. Bake in hot oven, and eat warm, sliced.
This is a sponge-method yeast cake of the German Butterkuchen type, and the instructions assume a cook who already knows how a barm sponge behaves. Two things in the text need correcting before anything else.
- Let the hot milk cool firstThe milk is called hot because it was scalded to keep it sweet, then poured over the flour to make the overnight sponge. Add the yeast only once the mixture is lukewarm, around 100-110F; milk above about 130F kills it outright.
- That cup of yeastA "small cup of yeast" means homemade liquid barm or a bought yeast brew, roughly half a cup to a cup of active liquid. Substitute 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast and add about half a cup of extra milk to make up the missing liquid.
- Enough flourThe overnight sponge should be a thick batter, not a kneadable dough, despite the wording: expect about 2 1/2 to 3 cups of flour at that stage. After the sugar, butter and eggs go in, another 2 to 3 cups brings it to a soft, sticky dough. It should never be stiff.
- Butter and sugar slow the riseOnce a cup each of sugar and butter are beaten in, fermentation drops off sharply. The second and third risings will take two hours or more in a warm room, not the forty minutes a lean dough needs. Judge by volume, not the clock.
- Pie platesOrdinary round tins, well greased. The recipe says "pour," so the dough should be slack enough to spread; if it is stiffer, press it out with buttered fingers to a shallow layer. The recipe gives no size or number, but a batch this size will need two or three plates.
- The cinnamon"3 tablespoonfuls of cinnamon and sugar mixed" most likely means three tablespoons of the finished cinnamon-sugar mixture rather than three tablespoons of cinnamon alone; read the other way it would be overwhelming. Mix a tablespoon or so of cinnamon into half a cup of sugar and use three tablespoons of that. The ounce of butter is dotted over the top, two tablespoons in all, so it melts into the sugar as a crust.
- Hot oven400-425F. These are shallow cakes and bake quickly, 18 to 25 minutes, until the top is deep gold and the sugar has caught at the edges.
- ServingEaten warm and sliced, as the original says. It is closer to an enriched bread than a butter cake and stales fast, so a day-old plate is best warmed through before serving.
Yeast-raised sheet cakes brushed with butter and cinnamon sugar are a fixture of German home baking, sold under names like Butterkuchen, Zuckerkuchen and, when a crumbed topping is added, Streuselkuchen; they belong to the coffee table rather than the dinner table, and their close kinship with bread dough is the point. Recipes of this kind reached English-language cookbooks largely through German-speaking households in America. The overnight sponge here is the older method: before packaged yeast was reliable, a cook kept a liquid barm going and set a batter with it at night so the leaven had all the hours it needed, then enriched the risen sponge in the morning. The name "supper cakes" suggests the plates were baked for the evening meal, when a warm sweetened bread served the same purpose as a pudding.