Some months after delivering the baby she conceived with Pete Campbell, Peggy Olson makes plans to have dinner with her mother, Katherine, and her sister, Anita Olson Respola, at their Brooklyn home. Peggy arrives late from work in Manhattan, and walks in carrying a vacuum cleaner she’s borrowed. Katherine and Anita have already eaten and are sitting in the kitchen.
Katherine, an old-school, devout Catholic mother, fears for Peggy’s soul. She urges Peggy to attend church, telling her that her late father would like it if she lit a candle for him. As Katherine leaves the room, she tells Peggy, “I pray for you.”
“She’s not going to be here forever,” says Anita. “Would it kill you to go?”
Peggy, who is increasingly asserting her independence and breaking away from her cloistered Brooklyn upbringing for a career in Manhattan, replies, “I don’t want to and I’m capable of making my own decisions.”
In response, Anita, whose shame and anger over her younger sister’s baby will soon bubble over in a church confession (season 2, episode 4; “Three Sundays”) delivers one of the most damning lines spoken in Mad Men: “Really? The State of New York didn’t think so. The doctors didn’t think so.”
Even the heavenly looking coffee cake on Katherine’s kitchen table couldn’t take the sting out of that.
The notion of a sweet cake taken with coffee originated in Europe in the seventeenth century. Sweet yeast breads were common in north central Europe and, when coffee was introduced in the 1600s, people discovered the two went well together. As the Germans and Dutch began arriving in New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, they brought their recipes for breads and cakes with them. “All of these colonial cooks made fruity, buttery breakfast or coffee cakes from recipes that vary only slightly from methods used in the twentieth century,” according to Evan Jones, author of American Food: The Gastronomic Story (Vintage Books, 1981). Even so, the term coffee cake itself was first used centuries later in the 1870s.
There are countless coffee cake variations, and we tested several before deciding that Katherine Olson’s coffee cake likely would have been, as most coffee cakes of the 1960s were, buttery, with more than a hint of cinnamon and a slight crunch on top. We found a recipe we believe Katherine would have liked—with a layer of meringue and jelly—in What Cooks in Suburbia by Lila Perl (1961). This treat might even be sweet enough to temper Anita’s bitterness.
“She may dwell…in an urban apartment building, a semi-urban garden apartment, or on a more spacious acreage of her own in a fashionable exurb,” wrote Perl in dedicating her book to the Modern Suburban Homemaker, “but if she has a kitchen, a family, and an entourage, large or small, of friends and neighbors, she is—for the purposes of this book—a suburban homemaker.” She’s talking to you, Katherine.
FROM WHAT COOKS IN SUBURBIA BY LILA PERL (E.P. DUTTON & CO., 1961)
NOTE: To make a coffee cake ring you can bake this cake in a 9-cup Bundt pan. Place half of the topping in the greased pan, followed by half of the batter, the remainder of the topping, the meringue filling, and the remaining half of the batter. Cool cake slightly and turn onto plate. Author Lila Perl suggests serving this cake freshly baked, slightly warm from the oven “for extra-special acclaim.”
For the brown sugar filling and topping
4 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons rolled oats
1⁄2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons chopped walnuts
For the meringue filling
1 egg white, at room temperature
1⁄3 cup tart jam or jelly
For the batter
12⁄3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1⁄2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons vegetable shortening
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
YIELD: 1 8-INCH CAKE