that gooey butter cake was – and is – typically eaten as a coffee cake, not as a dessert – at least in St. Louis.
Before long it migrated to Springfield, and gooey butter cake – sometimes simply called butter cake – was being made by several local bakeries and developing a host of devotees. One of the most popular was Rechner’s. “That gooey butter cake from Rechner’s is one of my best childhood memories,” says Ed Selinger. “We’d get two on a Sunday morning, and by the time we got home there’d be just one left. My mom wouldn’t let us get it every week, but when she did – boy, that was as good as going to the State Fair!” After Rechner’s closed in the 1980s, there were many requests for the recipe. The Rechner family did give it out, as did others claiming to have spinoffs of their recipe, but apparently none included the actual yeast dough – frozen bread dough was most typically called for. Donna Rechner (whose husband, Bill, came from a branch of the family that was not associated with the bakery) laughs when she recalls an incident that happened several years after Rechner’s had closed:
“We belonged to the Telephone Pioneers [a charitable group of phone company retirees, back when there was just one phone company], and we were asked to contribute to a bake sale at the Willard Ice Building. They told us to put our names on our items. I made my butter cake recipe – it wasn’t related at all to Rechner’s bakery, and I didn’t think a thing about it at the time – but when people saw that name, there was just a stampede!” The Rechner descendants with whom I spoke were surprised to learn that gooey butter cake originated in St. Louis. Not so Harold and Becky Figge. That’s because the Figges moved from their native St. Louis in 1958 and bought Springfield’s B and Z Bakery. Harold brought along his recipe for gooey butter cake. “People here were used to a version that was thinner than the St. Louis style, so I made them both.” The two were similar – using a yeast dough base – and were among his best sellers until the Figges retired and closed B and Z in 1988.
Last November, gooey butter cake hit the big time in the Big Apple when New York Times food writer Melissa Clark wrote about negotiating for the last piece at the Made By Molly stand at the Park Slope Farmers Market in Brooklyn. A friend had told her about it, saying “It’s yeasty on the bottom, like a babka, and sweet and gooey on top, like cheesecake but stickier,” she said. “It melts in your mouth.” The guy in line ahead of Clark had bought the last piece; she traded a brownie and two coconut bars for it. Readers who made the gooey butter cake recipe included in the article swooned with delight in online posts; a couple months later it appeared on The Hungry Mouse, a website recommended by Saveur magazine, and received equally rave reviews.
These days the cake batter/cream cheese version – sometimes with flavor variations – is as common in bakeries as with home cooks, and often has its own history. The family recipe used by St. Louis’ Gooey Louie dates back four generations. “It’s more home-style” says co-owner Debbie Stieferman. “We use the best quality ingredients, and everything – both the base and the filling – is made from scratch; not like Paula Deen, who uses a mix.” Gooey Louie (http://www.gooeylouiecake.com/) makes 10 different varieties from traditional, blueberry, nut, amaretto, to chocolate raspberry. The cakes are sold at their store at 6483 Chippewa (conveniently located just a half mile east of Ted Drewes Frozen Custard stand, so you can get two of STL’s sweetest traditions in one visit) and can also be ordered online or by phone and shipped.
Contact Julianne Glatz at [email protected].
Check out the recipe for Molly Killen’s St. Louis gooey butter cake online at www.illinoistimes.com.
