Health Bread
2 cupfuls flour 3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 cupfuls whole wheat flour 2 cupfuls bran 1 teaspoonful salt 1/2 cupful sugar 1 egg 2 cupfuls milk 1 cupful molasses 1 cupful stoned chopped dates 2 teaspoonfuls baking soda 1/2 cupful hot water Mix flours and bran together, add Crisco, salt, sugar, egg well beaten, milk, molasses, soda dissolved in boiling water, and dates. Mix well together and turn into two Criscoed and floured tins and bake in moderate oven one and a quarter hours. This bread is excellent for constipation. Sufficient for two loaves.
A molasses-and-bran quick bread, mixed like a batter rather than kneaded. Nothing here needs updating except the oven number and a few product names.
- Moderate ovenBake at 350F. At 1 1/4 hours in two standard 8 1/2 x 4 1/2-inch loaf pans, a skewer in the centre should come out with no wet batter clinging; molasses breads read done on colour long before they are set inside.
- CriscoThe book was published by the makers of Crisco, hence the brand in every line. Any solid vegetable shortening works, and melted butter or a neutral oil is fine at three tablespoons across two loaves. "Criscoed" tins simply means greased.
- BranThis is unprocessed wheat bran, sold as miller's bran, not bran breakfast cereal and not oat bran. Two cupfuls of it is a large proportion, so measure loosely rather than packing the cup.
- Soda and molassesThe two teaspoons of soda are raised by the acid in the molasses, not by the hot water, which is only there to dissolve it. Add it last and get the loaves into the oven promptly; the lift starts immediately.
- MolassesUse unsulphured dark molasses, not blackstrap, which is bitter enough to dominate a loaf with this much bran. Light table molasses gives a milder, sweeter bread.
- Stoned dates"Stoned" means pitted. A cupful of chopped dates is roughly 6 oz; toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they separate in the batter.
- ConsistencyThis is a thick, spoonable batter rather than a bread dough, and it should be. Do not beat it once the flour is in beyond what it takes to combine.
- Yield and keepingTwo loaves, as the recipe states. Bran breads firm up and improve overnight wrapped; they slice badly warm and do not keep long, so freeze the second loaf.
This comes from a genre of turn-of-the-century "health breads" built on wheat bran, which arrived in home baking as a by-product of roller milling. Once mills could strip bran and germ cleanly to make white flour, the bran was sold back to households and promoted for its laxative effect -- hence the blunt closing line. The recipe's other tell is Crisco itself: hydrogenated vegetable shortening was introduced in 1911, and cookbooks like this one were produced to teach cooks to use it in place of lard and butter, which is why it appears even in a loaf that needs only three tablespoons of fat. Dates and molasses do the sweetening work that a bran-heavy dough badly needs, and both were cheap pantry staples of the era.