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Raisin and Nut Bread
1 egg, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 1/2 cups milk, 1 teaspoon salt, 3 cups flour, 2 teaspoons baking powder, 2 tablespoons Crisco, 1/2 cup raisins, and 1 cup chopped walnut meats. Beat egg with sugar; add sifted flour, baking powder and salt alternately with milk; last add Crisco, melted, and walnuts. Bake in deep pan in slow oven 45 minutes.
A plain quick-bread batter of the sort that filled American loaf pans between the wars, written for a kitchen where Crisco was the new shortening. Two things in the text need attention before you start: the oven and the raisins.
- The raisins are never addedThey appear in the ingredient list and then vanish from the method. Toss them in with the walnuts at the end, ideally after dusting them with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- "Slow oven" and 45 minutes do not agree"Slow oven" and 45 minutes may not agree -- a slow oven is usually reckoned at about 300 to 325F, which is unlikely to set three cups of batter in a deep pan in 45 minutes. Treat this as a moderate oven, 325 to 350F, and expect 50 to 65 minutes for a standard 9x5-inch loaf; a skewer in the centre should come out clean.
- CriscoStill sold, and still behaves as intended here, though it has been reformulated to cut trans fats, using fully hydrogenated palm oil in place of the old partially hydrogenated oils. Any neutral solid shortening works, or melted butter for more flavour. Melt it and let it cool slightly so it does not cook the egg on contact.
- Deep panOne 9x5-inch loaf tin, greased and floured. Filled to about two-thirds, the batter will crack along the top as quick breads do.
- Mixing orderAdding dry and liquid alternately is the standard method of the period, and keeping the stirring brief is what keeps the crumb tender. Stop stirring as soon as the flour disappears.
- Resting and yieldCool in the tin ten minutes, then on a rack. Nut breads slice far more cleanly the next day. One loaf, twelve to fourteen slices.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre that flourished in the early twentieth century: the cookbook published by a manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a new product. Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was an all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening competing against lard and butter, and the accompanying recipe books by Marion Harris Neil put it into everything from pastry to this loaf. The bread itself is an ordinary chemically leavened quick bread, a form that spread rapidly in American homes after reliable commercial baking powder became cheap in the later nineteenth century and freed cooks from yeast for anything sweet or teatime-sized. Raisins and walnuts were the standard enrichment because both kept well in the pantry.