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Brown Nut Bread
4 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 eggs 1 cupful sugar 1 cupful sour milk 2/3 cupful New Orleans molasses 1 1/2 cupfuls flour 1 1/2 cupfuls graham flour 1/2 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful baking soda 1 cupful sultana raisins 1 cupful chopped nut meats Beat eggs and sugar together for five minutes, then add molasses, soda mixed with milk, salt, flours, raisins, and nuts. Mix and turn into Criscoed and floured cake tin and bake in slow oven one and a quarter hours. Sufficient for one medium-sized loaf.
A quick bread of the sour-milk-and-soda type, sweetened with molasses and bulked out with graham flour, raisins and nuts. The method as printed never mentions the melted shortening, so read the ingredient list carefully before you start.
- The missing fatThe four tablespoons of melted Crisco are listed but never called for in the instructions. Beat them in with the molasses, while the eggs and sugar are still loose, so the fat emulsifies rather than sitting in streaks.
- CriscoCrisco is still sold and behaves as intended here; any flavourless vegetable shortening or an equal volume of mild oil works. "Criscoed and floured" simply means greased and floured.
- Sour milkIn period usage this means milk left to sour and clabber, which is not what pasteurised supermarket milk does today. Use buttermilk cup for cup, or stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar into a cup of whole milk and let it stand ten minutes. The acid is what activates the soda.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground and including the bran and germ. Modern whole-wheat flour substitutes directly, though a coarser grind gives the nubbly texture the name implies.
- New Orleans molassesA mid-grade cane molasses, darker than golden syrup but not blackstrap. Ordinary unsulphured molasses is the right choice; blackstrap will make the loaf bitter and heavy.
- Slow oven300 to 325F. A molasses batter this sugary scorches at higher heat, and the low temperature is why it needs a full hour and a quarter.
- Pan and donenessA "medium-sized cake tin" here means roughly a 9 by 5 inch loaf pan. Test with a skewer at about 65 minutes; the crust will be very dark from the molasses long before the centre is set, so judge by the skewer, not the colour.
- SultanasGolden raisins. Toss them and the nuts in a spoonful of the measured flour before adding, or they sink to the bottom of a batter this wet.
- ServingOne loaf, roughly a dozen slices. A molasses loaf of this kind generally slices more cleanly the day after baking and keeps well wrapped for several days.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as promotional literature for Crisco, which is why the shortening appears by brand name throughout rather than as "lard" or "butter". Crisco, introduced in 1911, was among the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortenings, and books like this one existed to teach cooks that it could stand in for animal fat in baking. The bread itself belongs to an older American tradition: sour milk and saleratus or soda leavening, sweetened and coloured with cane molasses, and stiffened with graham flour, the coarse whole-meal named after the dietary reformer Sylvester Graham. Nut and raisin loaves of this kind were served as tea breads, sliced thin and often spread with butter or cream cheese, and they filled the same place in the household that banana bread does now.