The regional table / South Dakota
Kuchen
The dough is the easy half. Everything that can go wrong with a kuchen goes wrong in the last eight minutes of the custard.
South Dakota put its dessert on the statute book without saying what it is. House Bill 1229 of the Seventy-fifth Legislature reads, in Section 1 and in full: "Kuchen is hereby designated as the official state dessert of South Dakota." That sentence was added to chapter 1-6 and the Governor signed it on 14 March 2000. No dough, no fruit, no custard, no recipe — the act defines nothing. It took two sessions to get even that far, and the legislature's own record of the fight is better reading than the law. Senate Bill 191 of 1999, prime-sponsored by Senator Jim Lawler of Aberdeen and Representative Al Waltman, came out of Senate State Affairs 9 to 0 and passed the Senate 23 to 10. House State Affairs sent it out 12 to 1 on 24 February. Then the House deferred it on the 25th, deferred it again on the 26th, and on 1 March 1999 refused it 26 to 41, reconsidered the same day and refused it again, 27 to 39. The committee minutes name the people who came to Pierre for it — Nina Kunz of Eureka, Sherlock Hirning of Eureka, who appeared for the town's economic development company, and Representative Elmer Diedtrich — and they name one opponent, Senator Frank Kloucek. The day after the House killed it, Kloucek introduced a legislative commemoration honouring the Kuchen Festival at Delmont. In 2000 the bill came back as a House bill with Diedtrich prime, cleared House State Affairs 8 to 5 with nobody signed up against it, passed the House 39 to 24, cleared Senate State Affairs 8 to 1 and passed the Senate 19 to 11. A third of each chamber voted against a cake.
What the law leaves out matters here, because the word will not hold still. Kuchen is German for cake and covers most of what a German bakery sells. In South Dakota print it is slipperier still. The community newspaper archive at Vermillion, which holds the Clay County papers from 1862 onward, returns ten hits for the word across that whole run, and nine of them are the scanner reading kitchen: an 1875 column in The Dakota Republican on who is "now doing kuchen work", and the Vermillion Plain Talk of 2 November 1899 on the Kaiser's four k's, "kinder and kuchen, kleider and kirche (children and cooking, clothes and the church)" — the paper's own gloss, and that kuchen is Küche, the kitchen. The tenth is a recipe headed Apple Kuchen in the Wakonda Monitor of 21 May 1914, and it is a syndicated household column rather than anything local; its microfilm is too broken to quote a line of. So the archives in reach will not tell you what a Dakota kuchen is. The legislative record gets closest: the Delmont commemoration, sponsored again in 2000 by Kloucek, records a festival put on by the Delmont Historical Society at the Delmont Legion Hall from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on 15 October 2000, celebrating "the rich cultural heritage and traditional food of their German ancestors", and every person who testified for the bill came from that country — Eureka up in McPherson County, the Mobridge chamber of commerce, Delmont in the south. The custard is the thing none of those documents describe and the thing that makes this kuchen its own, so the quantities below were worked out for this page and the custard was built to the federal government's numbers.
Why this version works
Hot custard into a part-baked base. The Bureau broadcast a talk called "Custard Pie Problems" on 22 April 1935 that is really about this: "a raw crust lying beneath a very moist filling is likely to soak up some of that moisture before it can bake crisp and before the filling can set", and "a cold crust and a cold uncooked custard mixture just won't combine and bake with success, no matter how you adjust the oven." Their fix was to scald the milk with the sugar and salt, stir it into the beaten eggs and pour the hot mixture into an already baked shell. A kuchen base is yeast dough rather than pastry and soaks up even faster, so it gets the same treatment.
Weeping is overcooking, not bad luck. A listener wrote to the Bureau of Home Economics: "I have trouble with custard pies. They are always watery, although I use a standard recipe which I enclose. I also have trouble with watery baked custards." The answer, broadcast on Thursday 13 June 1940, was that "custards often become watery when they are cooked too long, or when they're cooked at too high a temperature." Farmers' Bulletin 471 of 1917 gives the mechanism in one sentence — egg white "when heated at the temperature of boiling water for a considerable time, becomes hard and contracts. This explains the curdling of custards and the shrinkage and toughening of omelets" — and contraction is the whole of it. The protein net keeps tightening after it has set, and what it squeezes out is the liquid it was holding.
A custard is an egg gel, and the oven sets it by holding back. USDA Leaflet No. 39, "Eggs at Any Meal", by Lucy M. Alexander and Fanny Walker Yeatman of the Bureau of Home Economics, 1929, gives the whole discipline in two lines: bake in a moderate oven, 350°F, on a rack in a pan of water, and "when the point of a thin knife comes out clean, the custard is done". The Bureau said the same thing on the radio in 1933: the rule of low temperature holds, "ranging from 250 degrees F. for fruit whips to 350 degrees F. for custards". Set the oven hotter and the outside of the kuchen is past done before the middle is anywhere near it.
More egg than a plain custard, because the fruit is watering it. Leaflet 39 builds a baked custard on four to six eggs to a quart of milk, and a soft one on three eggs or six yolks to the quart. This filling runs to three eggs in a pint and a half of cream, half again as rich as the top of that range. Fruit gives up juice into the custard while it bakes, and the kuchen has to be cut in wedges and lifted rather than spooned out of a cup. Build it at the plain ratio and you get a loose ring of sweet cream round every slice of apple.