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Crisco Milk Bread
3 tablespoonfuls sugar 3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls salt 1 yeast cake 1 quart milk About 7 pints flour Mix yeast cake with 1 tablespoonful sugar. Heat milk, add remainder of sugar, Crisco, and salt. Cool and add yeast and flour to make stiff dough. Turn out on floured baking board, cut in three pieces, knead first one piece, then others, stretching dough; let rise over night or in warm temperature five hours. Knead lightly and divide into Criscoed pans. Allow to rise and bake in moderate oven one hour. From same dough, French bread, breadsticks, horse shoe rolls and French rolls can be made.
Sufficient for three loaves.
A straightforward overnight milk bread from a Procter & Gamble promotional book, written when flour was measured by the pint and yeast came in a cake. The quantities are large — this is a three-loaf batch — and a few of the terms need translating.
- Scald and cool the milk"Heat milk" means scald it — bring it just to steaming, not a rolling boil. Scalding was held to deactivate something in raw milk that slackens dough; with pasteurised milk it is generally reckoned unnecessary. Either way the milk must be cooled to lukewarm before the yeast goes in, since hot liquid kills yeast.
- Flour by volumeSeven pints is 14 cups, somewhere between about 3 3/4 and 4 1/2 lb (1.7-2 kg) depending on how the flour is measured. Treat the figure as an upper limit and hold back the last cup or two until the dough comes together stiff.
- The yeast cakeOne cake of compressed yeast was about 0.6 oz. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 tsp) of active dry yeast, or 1 1/2 tsp instant. Creaming it with a spoonful of sugar, as directed, still works to check that it is alive.
- SaltTwo tablespoonfuls sounds alarming but works out near 2 percent of the flour weight, which is standard for bread. Do not scale the salt down without scaling the flour down too.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it. Any neutral solid vegetable shortening behaves the same; melted butter or a mild oil will give a slightly richer, softer crumb. "Criscoed pans" simply means greased.
- Moderate ovenUsually reckoned at about 350-375F. One hour suits full-size loaves in the deep pans of the period; check for an internal temperature of 190-200F and a hollow-sounding base rather than trusting the clock.
- Overnight rise"Over night" assumes an unheated kitchen. In a modern house at 70F the dough may well be over-proofed by morning — use the refrigerator overnight, or take the five-hour warm rise the recipe offers as an alternative.
- YieldThree loaves, or one loaf plus the French bread, sticks and horseshoe rolls the recipe suggests; the recipe states the same dough serves for all of them.
This comes from A Calendar of Dinners, one of the recipe books Procter & Gamble commissioned after introducing Crisco in 1911 to teach American cooks what to do with a hydrogenated vegetable shortening in kitchens that had always used lard or butter. The strategy was to put the brand name into the title of ordinary dishes em Crisco milk bread, Crisco pastry em so the product became inseparable from the technique. The bread itself is nothing new: it is an enriched milk dough raised overnight, and the same dough is noted as serving for French bread, breadsticks and horseshoe rolls, one batch shaped several ways. What is period-specific is the assumption of a cold kitchen, a compressed yeast cake bought fresh, and flour measured in pints.