Coffee Bread
3/4 cupful milk 1/2 cupful melted Crisco 1/2 cake compressed yeast 1 teaspoonful salt 2 eggs 1 cupful sugar 1 teaspoonful lemon extract 1/4 cupful chopped English walnut meats Flour Heat milk slightly, then add flour to make batter and yeast dissolved in little lukewarm water. Allow to rise until light, then add Crisco, eggs well beaten, sugar, lemon, salt, and enough flour to make stiff dough. Knead ten minutes and let rise until light. Place in Criscoed pan and let rise again. Spread with melted Crisco and sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon and nuts. Bake in hot oven half an hour.
Sufficient for one large loaf.
A sponge-method sweet yeast loaf from one of the Crisco promotional cookbooks, so the shortening is named as a brand in every step. The flour is left entirely to the cook's judgment, which is the one place this recipe needs interpretation.
- Flour, unmeasuredThe original gives no quantity because the sponge and dough were expected to be judged by feel. Figure roughly 1 cup in the initial batter and 2 1/2 to 3 cups more to bring it to a stiff but supple dough; add the last of it slowly.
- Compressed yeastHalf a cake of compressed (fresh) yeast is about 0.3 oz. Substitute 1 teaspoon active dry yeast, or 3/4 teaspoon instant, which can go straight into the flour without the lukewarm-water step.
- CriscoSimply vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated in the 2000s to cut trans fat, and now based on soybean and palm oil rather than cottonseed. Melted butter works and tastes better; "Criscoed pan" means greased.
- Hot ovenA hot oven in period usage is 400-425F. With a cup of sugar in the dough and more sprinkled on top, this browns fast — check at 20 minutes and tent with foil if the crust is running ahead of the crumb.
- The topping is unquantifiedNo amounts are given for the sugar and cinnamon strewn over the top. About 3 tablespoons sugar to 1 teaspoon cinnamon, with the quarter cup of walnuts, covers one large loaf.
- Three risesSponge, then dough, then the shaped loaf in the pan. The enriched dough is slow; expect 60-90 minutes for the second rise and 45 or so for the third at ordinary room temperature.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon of extract is assertive by modern palates. The zest of one lemon gives the same effect with less of the alcoholic edge.
- Doneness and yieldOne large loaf, 8 to 10 servings. The sugar topping makes crust colour an unreliable guide — go by an internal temperature around 190F.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a well-established genre: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a product. Crisco was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, marketed as a clean, odourless, shelf-stable replacement for lard and butter, and the recipe books that accompanied it named the brand in nearly every line — here it appears four times across the instructions and the ingredient list. The bread itself is not a Crisco invention. "Coffee bread" is generally taken as the plain English rendering of the Scandinavian and German sweet yeast breads (Swedish kaffebröd, German Kaffeekuchen), and is often said to have come to the American Midwest by way of immigrant households: an enriched dough, lightly spiced, brushed with fat and strewn with sugar and cinnamon, meant to be sliced alongside coffee rather than served as dessert. Its appearance in a national promotional cookbook shows how thoroughly that Central and Northern European baking habit had been absorbed into ordinary American breakfast baking by the 1910s.