[Sca-cooks] Spiesskuchen

[Huette von Ahrens]

--- Martinsen at ansteorra.org, "Kerri <kerrimart at cablespeed.com>"@ansteorra.org wrote:
> Hello!  I'm working on a redaction of Rumpolt's Gebacken 
> Recipe #20 for Spiesskuchen.  I've got the recipe 
> translated and am now researching similar recipes for a 
> basis for the redaction.
> 
> The Baumkuchen (Tree cake) may be close and the references 
> I've found date back 500 years, but I dont' have anything 
> hard and fast yet.  Granted I've just started.  
> 
> Right now I'm looking for varification (encouragement) 
> that I'm on the right track.  I'll try to remember to post 
> the recipe translation tonight.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> Vitha

Wow! So close and yet not so close. 

Here is my translation:

Take warm milk and beat eggs into them.  Make a dough with good white flour. Take a little barm 
and add butter to it. Let it stay a little while under the oven until it rises.  Punch it down. 
Add a little salt. Roll it out cleanly.  Throw black raisins there on.  Take a warm rolling pin 
and smear it with butter and lay [or roll] it over the dough. {Probably to work the raisins into
the dough.}  Wrap the dough therewith and bind it with a piece of cotton together so that is does
not fall off.  Lay it on the fire and turn slowly about so that it is evenly baked.  And when it 
is brown, take a basting brush [or stick] and stick it in hot butter and smear the cake with it
until it is a good brownish and when it is baked, take out the rolling pin spit and wrap it [the
cake] with the clean cloth so that the heat thereby remains, so let it remain until it become 
cool. So present it cold to the table when it becomes crisp and good. And one calls this spit
cake.

This could be an ancestor of baumkuchen in that it is cooked on a spit, but that is the only
likeness that I can see.

Baumkuchen, which I have not been able to trace farther than the early 19th Century, is a batter
cake which is poured layer by layer over the spit.  Each layer gets browned and cooked before
the next layer is poured on.  This is why it is called "baum" or tree cake, because it has
rings like a tree when you slice it open.  I would love to know where you found references to
baumkuchen that are earlier than the 19th Century.  Would you share please?

This spit cake is a yeast cake which is rolled out and has raisins added to the dough.  I have
not found a baumkuchen recipe that uses raisins.  It presumeably has only one layer, although
I am sure the dough gets wrapped multilayered around the rolling pin, but each layer doesn't
appear to get browned separately, so it doesn't appear to create a ring effect.

This recipe does sound delightful in and of itself.  It appears to get served as a tube, but
the recipe doesn't say if anything gets put inside the middle, like you would a canole.

Huette


Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves for 
they shall never cease to be amused.


		
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