Old Recipes

As part of a wedding shower gift I was given a book from my dad of photocopied pages from my grandmother's cookbooks.  They are not the complete works, but highlights from both of recipes my dad remembers my grandmother making or any she contributed to these books.  I have decided to transpose these recipes from the photocopies I have to a word document which I can print or send to other family members who have expressed an interest in getting a copy of these recipes.

In transposing these recipes, I have realized a couple of things about recipes from the 50s.  For one thing, I had no idea what a yeast cake is.  From the Cooking For Engineers website I have learned that it is equivalent to three 1/4-ounce packets of yeast.  The actually yeast cake looks like this:

Another thing I have noticed with the dozen or so recipes I have done so far is that time and temperatures for baking seem generally irrelevant.  Instructions will read something like, "bake in a moderately warm oven until done" which is less than helpful.  I think these ladies just knew the lingo or they all got a decoder ring with this cookbook when it came out.    

As I was typing these up, they made me hungry and want to try them, so I took this one for a spin tonight.  This is how it was written in the original text:

Crumb Kuchen

1 cup sugar

2 ½ cups flour

½ cup butter

Work these together till crumbs form.  Save one cup of these and to the remainder, add 1 cup sweet milk, 1 egg beaten, 1 teaspoon vanilla, 2 teaspoons baking powder.  Put in shallow pan, sprinkle crumbs on top and cover with cinnamon.

Mrs. H. E. Hyattm, Farmdale

A few things that might make this recipe work a bit better include pan dimensions and baking times and temperature.  I baked this in a 9x13 pan and it turned out well.  I looked up a similar recipe on the internet and it offered up baking at 350 for 20-25 minutes.  I would say at least 25 minutes.  I used skim milk and I melted the butter to make things mix up easier.  Overall, this was super easy and turned out to be amazingly delicious.  Here's hoping I find another few gems in the recipes as I go through them.  :)