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Raisin and Buttermilk Bread
4 cupfuls flour 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful soda 2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar 3 tablespoonfuls sugar 2 eggs Buttermilk to make soft dough 1 cupful sultana raisins Sift flour, salt, soda and cream of tartar into basin, rub in Crisco fine, add sugar, raisins, eggs well beaten, and sufficient buttermilk to make soft dough. Make into smooth mound, roll out, divide into four pieces, lay on greased tin and bake in moderate oven twenty-five minutes. Sufficient to make four small loaves.
A buttermilk soda bread dressed up with sugar and sultanas, mixed like a scone dough and baked in four small rounds. The dough should stay soft and be handled as little as possible.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350 to 375F is the usual modern reading; the book gives no figure. Twenty-five minutes suits small loaves; test with a skewer, which should come out clean, and expect a hollow sound when the base is tapped.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotion, so every fat is Crisco. Any vegetable shortening works, and 5 tablespoons of cold butter or lard rubbed in gives better flavour.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda with two of cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, roughly equivalent to something like 3 to 4 teaspoons of modern baking powder. Because the buttermilk is also acidic, the rise is fast and largely spent in the first minutes, so get the loaves into the oven immediately after mixing.
- Buttermilk quantityThe original leaves this open. Expect somewhere between 1 and 1 1/2 cups for 4 cups of flour with two eggs already in; add it in stages and stop when the dough just holds together and is still tacky.
- FlourPeriod all-purpose flour is generally reckoned to have been softer than today's. Plain all-purpose is fine; bread flour will make the crumb tough in a dough handled this briefly.
- Roll out, then divideTake "roll out" loosely. Pat the mound to about 1 inch thick, cut into four, and shape each piece lightly into a round. Overworking or rolling thin gives a dense, dry loaf.
- SultanasSultanas are golden raisins. If they are dry, cover with hot water for ten minutes and drain well, or they will pull moisture from the crumb.
- Yield and keepingFour small loaves, each cutting into six or eight wedges. Soda breads stale within a day; serve warm with butter, and toast anything left over.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening introduced in 1911, and the book's relentless substitution of Crisco for butter and lard in every recipe is the point of it. This particular loaf is probably not American in origin: it looks like the sweetened, fruited branch of the British and Irish buttermilk soda bread family, close kin to the tea brack and the raisin scone, and the pairing of soda with cream of tartar reflects the era before boxed baking powder had entirely displaced the two-tin method in home pantries. Buttermilk in these recipes was still often the genuine by-product of churning butter, thinner and sharper than the cultured milk sold under the name today, which may be part of why the liquid quantity is given as "sufficient" rather than a number.