Flour
Add boiling water to oats and allow to stand one hour; add molasses, salt, Crisco, yeast cake dissolved in lukewarm water, and flour to make stiff dough; knead well, let rise, knead a very little, divide into two Criscoed bread pans, let rise again and bake forty minutes in moderate oven. Sufficient for two small loaves.
A steamed-oat yeast bread of the type that filled out the bread chapter of every early twentieth-century household book. The text as printed gives the method but leaves the quantities to a separate ingredient list, so treat it as a procedure rather than a complete formula.
- Missing quantitiesThe verbatim passage names the ingredients but not the amounts, which the original book gave separately. For two small loaves, plausible proportions would be something like 1 cup rolled oats to 2 cups boiling water, 1/3 to 1/2 cup molasses, 2 teaspoons salt, 2 tablespoons shortening and 5 to 6 cups flour; anything more precise than that would be invention.
- The hinge: cool the oats firstThe oats absorb boiling water and stand an hour largely so the mixture drops to lukewarm. Add the dissolved yeast only when the oat mush is around 100-110F; much hotter than that and the yeast will be damaged or killed and the loaves will not rise.
- Yeast cakeA cake of compressed yeast is usually reckoned at about 0.6 oz, roughly equivalent to 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast, though period cake sizes varied. Compressed cake yeast needed dissolving in lukewarm water; instant yeast can go straight into the flour.
- CriscoCrisco is a solid vegetable shortening, originally hydrogenated cottonseed oil and since reformulated; it is still sold and still interchangeable here with any solid shortening, and butter works and adds flavour. "Criscoed bread pans" simply means greased pans.
- Moderate ovenConventionally around 350-375F. Forty minutes is plausible for two small loaves in pans of about 8x4 inches; check for an internal temperature of 190-200F rather than trusting the clock, since oat and molasses doughs brown early and can look done outside before the centre sets.
- Oats"Oats" in this period means rolled oats, not steel-cut or instant. Steel-cut will not soften enough in an hour's soak.
- Rise timesThe original gives none. Expect 1 to 1 1/2 hours for the first rise at room temperature and 45 minutes to an hour in the pans, judged by doubling in bulk rather than by the clock. The "knead a very little" between rises means a brief deflate and shape, not a full second kneading.
- YieldTwo small loaves, about 12 slices each.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble as a promotional cookbook for Crisco, which came on the market in 1911; that is why shortening appears in a plain oatmeal bread where an older book would have said lard or butter, and why the verb "to Crisco" a pan turns up as though it were ordinary English. The bread itself is much older than the product: scalding oats or oatmeal in boiling water before adding flour was a common practice in Scottish and New England kitchens alike, both to soften the grain and to stretch more expensive wheat flour. Molasses is a usual sweetener for such loaves, cheap and dark, and it gives the crumb its brown colour and slight chew.