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Steamed Nut Bread
1/2 pint graham flour 1/3 cupful Crisco 1/2 cupful white flour 1 cupful chopped English walnut meats 1/2 teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 cupful milk 1 cupful sugar 1 egg Cream Crisco and sugar together, add egg well beaten, milk, salt, flours, baking powder, and nuts. Mix and turn into Criscoed mold, cover with greased paper and steam two hours. This nut bread is delicious served hot with butter. It may be served as a pudding with cream or liquid sauce. Sufficient for one loaf.
A steamed quick bread from one of Procter & Gamble's Crisco cookbooks. Nothing here is difficult, but the steaming setup and the half-pint measure need translating.
- Half a pint of flourIn American dry measure a half pint is one cup, so you want 1 cup graham flour to 1/2 cup white flour. Graham flour is coarse whole-wheat; ordinary whole-wheat flour works, stone-ground if you have it.
- CriscoAny solid vegetable shortening substitutes directly for the 1/3 cup, and butter works too, though it browns the crumb slightly; if you use salted butter it will add a little salt. "Criscoed mold" simply means well greased.
- The moldA pudding mold or a coffee tin is the usual vessel for this sort of loaf. The batter runs to something like four to five cups, so use a mold of about 1 1/2 to 2 quarts (or divide between two tins) and fill no more than two-thirds full, since baking powder plus steam gives a generous rise.
- Covering it properlyThe greased paper is not decorative. Steam condensing onto the batter turns the top to paste, so cover with greased parchment and then foil, and tie or crimp it down tightly.
- SteamingSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, cover, and hold a bare simmer. Check the water level every 40 minutes and top up with boiling water, never cold.
- Two hours is realSteamed batter climbs to about 210F and no higher, so the time is not padding. A skewer should come out clean and the loaf should feel springy; if it is still wet at two hours, give it another 15 minutes.
- UnmoldingLet it stand 10 minutes off the heat, then turn out. Steamed loaves slice badly while very hot and better after a short rest, though the recipe is right that it is best warm.
- Yield and servingOne loaf, roughly eight to ten slices. As a pudding it takes a hard sauce or thin custard; as bread, butter while warm.
Procter & Gamble commissioned cookbooks after introducing Crisco in 1911, which is why hydrogenated shortening appears in a recipe where an earlier book would have said butter or lard, and why the mold is "Criscoed" rather than simply greased. The bread itself belongs to an older tradition: steamed puddings and brown breads were common in kitchens where the range fire was unreliable, and the technique survived into the baking-powder era because it produces a dense, moist crumb that keeps well. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer who preached coarse unsifted wheat; by the 1910s the name had detached from the crusade and simply meant whole-wheat. English walnuts, so called for reasons variously explained — often to distinguish them from the native American black walnut, though the name is also traced to their arrival on English merchant ships — were the milder and more fashionable choice for a tea bread of this kind.