The family tree

PREVIOUSLY, I talked about the rotisserie cake family. Today, it's all about the family tree!
I just posted my translation of a 1964 article (well, 75% of it). The author, Fritz Hahn, did copious research to track cakes on spits from ancient Greece to modern Europe, identifying five "generations":

•  Generation I is the ancient Greek ὁβελίας, a very large bread baked for Dionysian celebrations some time before 600 B.C. When you want to bake a bread as large as possible, you can't use some dinky oven in a cramped kitchen. You've got to go big! Find a long tree trunk, wrap your bread dough around it, and make a huge fire. There's good evidence that the Bacchanal Romans continued this tradition for many centuries, spreading it to the north. After the collapse of the Roman empire, there are no more references to bread on a spit for nearly a millenium; it shows up in Daun, Germany, in 1466. Hahn suggests that this German bread is a direct descendant of the Roman bread, but I think it's pure coincidence. Convergent evolution, if you will.
• In Generation II, the big German bread-on-a-spit gets shrunk and sweetened. Sugar was a rarity, so the yeast-dough cakes were seasoned with currants, honey, ginger, citrus peel, or other delights. The earliest attested recipe is from 1450. Modern helical chimney cakes (i.e. kürtőskalács and trdelník) are still considered Gen. II cakes in Hahn's taxonomy.
• Generation III seems like a bit of a misstep. Previous versions were secured on the spit by winding a tight helix of dough. The Gen III cake is still yeast dough, but rolled out in a big rectangular sheet, then cinnamon-rolled onto the wooden form. To keep the cake on the roll, the chef has to bind it with string, or else it would get saggy and fall off. HOWEVER, the string also restricts how much the cake-roll expands wherever it is placed, which may have led to a pleasant smooth-ridged exterior like we see today.
• Generation IV is the big shift from single-layer yeast-dough cakes to many-layer liquid-batter cakes! Hahn credits the new development to two things: the introduction of coffee (which fostered innovation wherever it went) and the 30 Years War (which occupied most of the employable men, and finally gave women access to the trade manuals and cookbooks that had long been men's secrets). The first two people to write Gen IV recipes were women! Susanna Harsdörffer, in 1582, and Maria Sophia Schellhammer, in 1692. Šakotis is a Gen IV cake. [EDIT: oops, in modern times it is usually made in the Gen V manner]
• Generation V is what we know and love today. This version vastly improves texture by separating the eggs, beating the whites and folding them into the rest of the batter. This has the added benefit of making many thinner layers possible. Yes!

Another noteworthy point from the article: the name baumkuchen predates the Gen IV and V cakes (the only generations with the rings-of-a-tree feature). It must have been first named that because it was baked on a tree trunk.

1581-82 was a boom year for cake publishing

I've been doing lots of historical spitcake reading, and one particular find has got me in a tizzy. There is a Yahoo! group, still active no less, transcribing and translating all sorts of old cookbooks for this digital age! The main focus of the group is Marx Rumpolt's Ein new Kochbuch from 1581, which Wikipedia calls "the first textbook for professional chefs in training." This book is too early in spitcake development, so it doesn't feature the phrase baumkuchen, but it does give a recipe for Spieß kuchen (spit cake) and recommends serving it to nobility as the third (final) course of the first meal of the day.

The group leader, Ranvaig, gives the following translation:

Take warm milk and beat eggs with it / mix a dough with fair white flour / take little beer yeast and butter to it / let it stand a while behind the oven / that it rises / make it again into a ball / and salt it a little / then roll it out cleanly / throw black raisins over it. Take a Walger (roller) / that is warm / and rubbed with butter / and lay it on the dough / wrap the dough over / and tie it together with a twine / so it does not fall off / lay to the fire and turn slowly / like this will it roast cleanly. And when it becomes brown then take a brush / and put it into hot butter / and coat the cake with it / like this it will be a beautiful brown. And when it is roasted / so take it off the roller spit / and put into both holes with a clean cloth / that the heat remains / let it remain like this / until it is cool so give cold on a table / so it becomes tender and good. And one calls it Spiesskuchen.

As you can see, it's a chimney cake, not a tree cake. Supposedly, the first real tree cake is mentioned only one year later, in Nuremberg, by Susanna Harsdörfer. But that recipe, like I mentioned in the last post, is hand-written and I'm still working out the translation. However, now that I've discovered this DELIGHTFUL Yahoo! group, I think it'll go a little easier!

Transliteration and translation by Sharon Palmer aka Ranvaig Weaver, © 2013.

The cake things I've been doing

I'm learning lots of cake history from Kurtos dot EU! I've been focusing my efforts for now on two old recipes. This one is from 1582 and supposedly describes the first layered spitcake (i.e., the first tree cake). A second one (whose transcription/translation I haven't put online yet) is from 1769, containing the first "modern" baumkuchen recipe. I'm not sure what "modern" means in that context, but that's the description used by Fritz Hahn. Fritz Hahn, by the way, was a baumkuchen historian who did a ton of very useful research in the 1960s and cited his sources very well. Me discovering him is the reason why I've suddenly switched to paleography and historical fact-finding.

Updating my web presence

I don't know what's compelled me to try maintaining a fuller, nicer web presence. Check out my new twitter account and my wonderful business card. Next: a non-blogspot website!

THREE CAKES, TWO DAYS, PART THREE: Taste Testing

Soon we arrived in North Carolina to try the still-fresh cakes with Theo, my good buddy and host. It was time to give the cakes a proper and thorough tasting!



Okay, so the video isn't really the "proper and thorough tasting," more of a precursor. Good thing I took detailed notes, because I'm writing this up like ten months after the fact. The whole affair drove home the point that there is an impressive variety possible in rotisserie cake-baking. Artisanal one-off baumkuchens and vacuum-sealed Japanese-grocery-store baumkuchens are incomparable, it's true. But how do you compare baumkuchen and šakotis and gâteau à la broche?

Well, let's start by fawning over the two baumkuchens that were on that table. Herr Taesler's cake was a treat for its nuanced flavoring. It was not as sweet as cakes often are, which made room for subtle flavors to come through. Rum, vanilla, almond, butter, and fruit notes played in harmony as we chewed and pontificated. The Lutz baumkuchen, meanwhile, stood out for its luxurious texture. The flavor was fairly uniform, sweet and rum-like, but the cake was moist and texturally decadent in a way that only layer-by-layer cake baking can achieve.

This was my first proper šakotis, too! I was not expecting it to be so thin! As a result it was dry and crunchy. I'm not sure how typical that thinness is. The Pyrenean gâteaux I saw varied greatly in thickness, so I'm hesitant to judge all šakotis by this one's dimensions. The flavor was eggy, like a cookie that would pair well with a strong coffee on a winter morning. Mmmm.

All in all, a very good day!

THREE CAKES, TWO DAYS, PART TWO: Piqua, Ohio

I rather like the candidness in this photo.

I've mentioned Herr Taesler before. Last July I actually got to meet him! I think we were both equally excited about the encounter, because it meant a rare opportunity to discuss an odd interest in person.

The tour of baumkuchen Mecca began, of course, in the kitchen. Hr. Taesler doesn't use a Ronco Rotisserie, as I first supposed--it's a similar product, but reaches a higher top temperature. Klaus has special modifications for his tapered baumkuchen forms (below, you can see one artfully bound in string, a traditional tying method that helps the first layers adhere). He described the heat from the near-constantly open oven as physically taxing, especially in the summer; fortunately, most of his orders come near Christmastime. There's a lot of finessing and tweaking to make sure the cakes turn out superbly. He gave me a lot of practical advice: The first layers' adhesion is critical. There's nothing worse than seeing a nearly-done cake fall apart in the oven. As soon as you can, wrap the fully-baked cake in plastic wrap so it stays moist while cooling. Try making multiple batters with different flavorings and alternate which one you use on each layer.

Everything about the experience gave a mystical sense of passing on a dying craft.







We continued talking over tea. The Taeslers shared with us some hearty homemade black bread, and showed off an antique Swiss crossbow so big that it took two soldiers to load it. Naturally, we tried some of his baumkuchen here too. The fresh cream and chocolate ganache filling the center were heavenly, and the flavors that ring out in the cake itself were, to me, strong reminders of the vast differences between artisanal hand-made baumkuchen and automated robot baumkuchen. It was a terrific day.

The cakes themselves get a fuller analysis in the next post!

THREE CAKES, TWO DAYS, PART ONE: Chicago

Opportunities for spitcake tourism are few and far between, so three cakes in two days is something special. Maybe a record! Definitely a record for "hardest trip to explain to my roommates."

My last day in Chicago, at the height of summer, was my day to get spitcakes with my copilot (who is also named Sam). I knew that Chi-tonw was home to Lutz Café, up by Horner Park, and Racine in the Polish-Lithuanian southwest side.



The display of Lutz baumkuchen available to-go.



Racine šakotis/raguolis in its protective plastic wrap.

Lutz Café, which offers baumkuchen, is very much a restaurant and tea room. Racine is rather a specialty supermarket which happens to have šakotis (which they call raguolis, equally valid). Both places bake their cakes on-site, though only Lutz has the option of eating it there. Most are packaged up and sold just like a mass-produced confection. This seemed unjust to me, but I didn't have much time to dwell on it. Sam and I splurged on cakes, loaded them into a cooler, and early next morning set off for a little hamlet in Ohio, to meet a man who needs no introduction...

The Introduction

Sometime around October 2007, I discovered baumkuchen through Wikipedia's list of cakes. It instantly attracted my attention because of the novelty of baked goods on a rotisserie. Plus, it's theoretically infinitely scalable: with the right equipment one could potentially make a cake as long and as thick as desired.

I finally tasted baumkuchen on January 3, 2008. I got a slice from some Japanese marketplace in Sydney, and hot damn, it was incredible. Surely I would have to get my own baumkuchen oven.

I found a few ovens for sale (links will come in a later post), but most of the manufacturers would not talk to me. The one studio that did give me a price quote listed their cheapest model as ¥680.000 sans shipping. That seemed insane for an Angelino such as myself; the only option was to make my own oven.

Now, I'm not very good at designing simple things. My mind is always in terrible disarray, with half-baked ideas flying every which way. That's the reason why I started this blog: to organise my thoughts and provide direction in a hobby I believe I am pioneering.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about the "pioneering a hobby" bit. I know next to nothing about baumkuchen and the other related rotisserie cakes, nor their place in European and Japanese cultures. Maybe people make the rotisserie versions at home somehow? Perhaps there are millions of people out there who would fall over laughing at my naïveté and ignorance.

Ah well. Here's to a successful baumkuchen oven! Eventually!