Community Corner

History Through Baking

Susan LaRosa bakes and blogs about early 20th century recipes (and shares one of them with us, below!)

Park Slope resident Susan LaRosa bakes not only to satisfy her sweet tooth, but also to unearth history.

The 11th Street resident, whose red velvet cake was just named the best in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Historical Society’s The Red Show, bakes from a collection of early 20th Century recipes she has collected over time, and writes about the experience on her blog, A Cake Bakes in Brooklyn.

“I’ve always collected these recipe cards. I see them as material culture left by women in earlier times,” said LaRosa, 55, a Park Slope resident since 1982 and self-taught baker. She bakes primarily from recipes dating from 1900 to the 1960s.

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LaRosa points out a recipe for sponge cake as an example of the cultural value of her recipe collection, as well as the challenges in baking desserts from another era. The recipe lists only the ingredients for the cake, and virtually no instructions.

“At this time, it was just part of the collective knowledge,” said LaRosa. “Everybody knew how to make a sponge cake.”

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Such recipes turn baking into detective work for LaRosa, who often must decipher what size of pan to use, or how much of a particular ingredient.

Other recipes are indicative of hard times: a recent blog post for Caramel Dumplings, an unusual dessert of simple flour dumplings simmered in a caramel sauce, requires little more than a bit of flour, butter, milk and sugar.

“I imagine that this dessert is a home-grown and beloved family recipe, one borne of economic necessity or perhaps invented one night when the kids were clamoring for dessert but the pantry was bare,” wrote LaRosa on her blog.

LaRosa’s impressive recipe collection has been gathered over years, found at flea markets and estate sales, or even on websites like eBay and Etsy.

“I look at handwriting as a real clue to whether a recipe might be good,” she said. “Or really stained recipe cards, those have been used a lot. I like to commune with other sloppy bakers.”

Her collection, which spans the better part of a dining room bookcase, comes not only in the form of individual recipe cards, but decades-old, self-published cookbooks, binders and scrapbooks full of recipes. Many are handwritten or typed, or punctuated by notes from the original owner, scrawled into the margins.

“I view them as a sort of window into these women’s lives,” said LaRosa.

She rarely repeats recipes, but her endeavors have yielded a few favorites, including a batch of Date Crackers (which she describes as “transcendent”) and a poppy seed cake.

Of course, such adventurous baking has yielded a few mistakes, too.

A Brown Sugar Pudding LaRosa embarked upon earlier this year ended up being more like “Cake Soup” – a gooey mess of crispy cake floating atop a sea of melted sugar.

And then there was the Canadian War Cake, a raisin spice cake that was victim of World War I era rationing. With no eggs, milk or butter, LaRosa said it tasted more like a brick.

““Ive made a lot of modern recipes that haven’t been good either. The idea is to be true to a recipe. These speak to a simpler time. Things weren’t as sweet or over the top,” said LaRosa.

But the recipes themselves aren’t necessarily simpler.

 “I really think baking technique has stayed the same,” she said.

These days, LaRosa bakes four times a week, or more. Usually she shares her concoctions with her coworkers at the Henry Street Settlement, where she is director of marketing. Occasionally, she has been known to bring her extra goodies to the CHIPS soup kitchen on Fourth Avenue, as well.

“I have a love of sugar, really,” said LaRosa. “When the kids were younger, we didn’t always have a home cooked dinner, but we always had dessert.”

For LaRosa baking is only a much-loved hobby, but she may soon become a little bit more serious about the occupation: she was recently contacted by none other than an agent from author Jonathan Franzen’s office, about potentially turning her trials and tribulations into a cookbook.

“This is what I love about baking,” said LaRosa. “A pork chop still looks like a pork chop after you cook it, but you combine butter and flour and it becomes something completely different. I like that kind of magic.”

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Gold Cake

From A Cake Bakes in Brooklyn

Baker Susan LaRosa was nice enough to share one of her early 20th century recipes with us. This one is for a classic yellow cake, paired alongside a chocolate frosting.

Ingredients:

2 ½ cups cake flour

1 2/3 cups sugar ½ cup butter, softened

1 tsp. salt

1 ½ cups milk (divided)

3 ½ tsp. baking powder

5 egg yolks

1 tsp. lemon or vanilla flavoring

Method:

Preheat oven to 350 F.  Grease and flour two 9-inch round cake pans. Measure flour, sugar, butter, salt and ¾ cup milk into mixing bowl and mix thoroughly for 2 minutes.

Stir in baking powder.  Blend.

Add ¾ cup milk, eggs yolks and flavoring.  Blend for two minutes.

Pour into prepared pans.

Bake 35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.  Cool for 10 minutes before removing from pan.

Mocha Cocoa Frosting

Ingredients:

 ½ cup butter, softened

½ tsp. vanilla

3 cups confectioner’s sugar

½ cup unsweetened cocoa powder

¼ tsp. salt 1/3 cup cold black coffee

Method:

Cream butter, add vanilla.  Sift sugar, cocoa and salt together.  Add alternately with coffee to butter, beating to spreading consistency.  Spread on warm cake.


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