Actually, coffee cake is strangely emblematic of the shifts in American food choices that corresponded with modernization and industrialization. For example, coffee cakes became even more popular in American cuisine with the expansion of refrigeration in the 1930’s; before then there wasn’t easy access to sour cream, a key ingredient that activates baking soda to act as a leavening agent. But before then, coffee cakes were a staple of readymade food purchases at the turn of the 20th century.

As Katherine Leonard Turner writes in the journal Food, Culture, & Society, food historians generally accept that by the 1960’s middle class Americans had cemented their interest in purchasing readymade foods, romanced by the glamor of national ad campaigns and the ease of this new convenience. But this focus obscures another food history truth: from the late 1800’s onward, densely populated American cities began offering local readymade foods to the working class. This facet of urban economies may not have been as glamorous, but it served a need: offering inexpensive foods to laborers who lacked time to make at-home foods. It’s in the period that coffee cakes’ popularity expanded that bakeries proliferated in America’s industrial centers. Turner offers, “in 1879 there were 6,396 bakeries in the United States, roughly one for every 7,800 Americans. By 1909 there were 23,926 bakeries, or one for every 3,800 people. In short, there were twice as many bakeries per capita in 1910 as in 1880.” Surely coffee cakes are just a piece of that history, but they’re a sweet slice, nonetheless. And since these bakeries, as Turner explains, were primarily operated by German and Jewish immigrants, it’s safe to say that coffee cakes were a staple in them.