The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1890-03-22

LEADEN BUTTER CAKES.
The Mainstay of tina Cellar Restaurants i
Our Large Cities.

The Mainstay of tina Cellar Restaurants in
Our Large Cities.
Z "Coffee and cakes, " ordered customer
in an east side restaurant of small pre-
tensions late one cold night recently.
'-Cakes are wet, amt thcy?" he added in
a moment later.
"Yes, all wet" replied the waiter.
The cakes were served, and it was APP
parent that the term wet" applied to
them was not used literally, but merely
to distinguish them from another sort
known as dry" They were saturated
with lard, or grease of some sort, called
butter for the purposes of trade. The
dry" cakes have no butter on them
when served, and the customer has to
supply that deficiency from plate on the
table. Both are styled butter cakes,
and, though their popularity has fallen
off of late years, they are still consumed
in sufficient quantities, after midnight
and before dawn, to give employment to
pretty large army Of manufacturers in
New York.
But butter cakes are in demand at all
hours of the day and night" said a
dealer who does large trade in coffee
and cakes. printers and those who
work when others are in their beds
feed upon them in preference to taking
heavy meals at unreasonable times. |
prefer sirloin steak, first, last and all
the time, myself, but l believe that the
cakes are healthier for men who must
eat in a hurry and rush back to their
work as soon as they have cleared their
plates and emptied their cups; and try
to make them good and light. Coffee
and sinkers used to be the name by
which the basement supper was COM
monty known. The sinkers were butter
cakes, made so heavy that fishing line
might have been weighed down with
one of them. They were, indeed, very
filling at their price, and few of them
went a long way with hungry man.
They owed their apparently substantial
qualities to the fact that they contained
no yeast They were pure dough, and
even now they may be obtained, wet or
dry at many places in New York. They
require great deal of coffee to wash
them down, and, though an extrava-
gantly large amount of flour must be
used in their manufacture, they are
fairly profitable to every one who han
dies them, with the exception, perhaps,
of the consumer.
"But the improved butter cake is a
different sort of thing altogether. 1t is
SO light that a man whose appetite is in
reasonably good working order can
readily put away dozen of them in the
time he would take to worry down THREE
of the old kind, and with much better
results. They are made in various ways,
but the main ingredients are flour and
yeast.
"a good bread baker is the proper
artist to stand over batch of butter
cakes, for in it's initial process the man
ufacture of loaves and cakes is the same.
But after the yeast has raised the dough,
which it occupies night in doing, tho
biscuits are shaped in a mold, fried
quickly in plenty of frosh butter, and
served piping hot.
"Who has not heard of homemade bread?
heavy mixture Of putty and lead.
{ "Hood knew what he was talking
about when he said that. But heavy
butter cakes-of which Hood knew moth
ing or he would certainly have sung
them to scorn-are far worse than heavy
bread. IN. Y. Sun.