Thank you for reading Between the Layers! Please enjoy and share this free post with your friends. Gooey Butter Cake + Chicken Pot Pie - No. 269For snow day baking, January cravings, or just nostalgia. Plus it’s National Pie Day!
AS I LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW at eight inches of snow last week, I was reminded of Covid and the project baking we all took on to get through that strange time. I wasn’t sure if I was experiencing a Covid flashback, but something inside of me craved Gooey Butter Cake, a recipe I hadn’t thought about in years. When four days later the snow hadn’t budged and neither had my desire for Gooey Butter Cake, well, I gave in. How fortuitous that I had everything in the house to bake this old-fashioned recipe born 100 years ago in the American Midwest.
The signature dessert of St. Louis, Gooey Butter Cake is what the name suggests - a wonderfully gooey cake that doesn't quite set when baked.Cake mix versions of gooey butter cake call for cream cheese and a load of powdered sugar. They make my teeth ache just to look at them. But St. Louis natives know the original recipe was once made from scratch using yeast in the crust. But is the original from St. Louis? Or was this cake just a German kuchen (cake) of the early 20th century, and baked and sold in German bakeries that dotted the Midwest and other big cities? St. Louis likes to say the cake originated there in the 1930s, and the stories go that a baker was in a hurry and left out a key ingredient or that the baker intentionally was experimenting to create something new. But what resulted cannot be disputed - a wildly popular gooey butter cake. Marjorie Child Evans, a cooking teacher with a school in Joplin, Missouri, located in the southwestern corner of the state, was demonstrating how to make butter cakes - or butter kuchen - in the 1920s. Kuchen, affectionately called kucha, are a part of the German baking heritage, both in Germany and with German-Americans. They were well advertised in Missouri and Illinois newspapers throughout the 1950s.
But not too far away, in Louisville, Kentucky, butter kuchen dates to the 1920s with both Heitzman and Plehn's bakeries offering not a gooey but a "runny" butter kuchen. It is possible that the runny butter cake and gooey butter cake evolved about the same time, as both Louisville and St. Louis were cities with strong German populations and a wealth of bakeries. When I was researching my book American Cake I spoke with Judy Evans, the longtime food editor for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. She often searched for the origin of this cake but turned up nothing. "I don't think anyone knows where gooey butter cake originated,’’ she said. ‘’We've asked around over the years." Those three words are powerful - gooey butter cake. Butter cake on its own gets my attention, but if it’s gooey, then I’m all ears. Judy Evans shared her recipe with me, and with a few recent tweaks, it’s even gooey-er. I’m not sure that’s a word that would fly by an English teacher, but for January baking, it works.
And as promised, another January craving - chicken pot pie.This is not only National Pie Day, but it’s pot pie season. So I’ve unlocked my post from two years ago for everyone to read. It shares some secrets to making the best chicken pot pie. Yes, cook your own chicken and make your own broth - those are paramount - but even if you cheat and used canned stock it’s about not over-thickening the filling, and using the best pie crust you can make or purchase, slicing your favorite veggies, and tossing in that element of surprise - a cardamom pod or two. That’s what I’ve been cooking. What about you? And do tell if you know the Gooey Butter Cake origin story… - xo, Anne
THE RECIPES: Gooey Butter CakeHere is the Judy Evans St. Louis recipe, very slightly modified. It comes in two parts, the dough and the filling. Both are simple, but they need to be staged timewise. Make the dough first, and then go clean your house if you like to multi task. If the dough is sticky, flour your fingertips so you can press it into the bottom of the pan. And find a warm place in the kitchen for it to rise. The rise time will differ depending on temperature, but allow somewhere between one and two hours for the dough to double. The filling comes together quickly, like making the filling for pie, and in fact, it tastes like a pie filling, which gets me thinking that the gooey butter cake and the transparent pie and Indiana’s sugar cream pie and my Southern chess pie are all cousins, born out of necessity and baking with what you had in the house. Serve warm, and reheat the leftovers! Makes: 16 servings
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