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Brown Bread with Raisins
Adding to the above mixture one cupful of seeded or Sultana Raisins (seedless) makes a fine fruit bread.
This is a variation line rather than a standalone recipe: it depends entirely on the brown bread batter printed above it in the booklet. A few things are worth knowing before you fold the fruit in.
- Find the parent recipe firstNothing here works without the preceding brown bread formula, which is not reproduced on this page. If the base is a New England-style brown bread, it will likely be a molasses-sweetened batter of cornmeal with rye and/or graham flour, raised with baking soda and soured milk, and often steamed -- but read the preceding recipe through and follow it, rather than assuming.
- "Seeded" versus "seedless"Seeded raisins are raisins that have had their seeds removed, not raisins that contain them. The distinction mattered when many table raisins were still sold with pips in; Sultanas were a well-known seedless sort. Nearly all raisins sold today, dark or golden, are already seedless.
- One cupfulA cup of raisins is roughly 5 oz / 150 g. That is a generous but not excessive load for a standard loaf-sized brown bread batter; much more and the crumb will struggle to hold together.
- Flour the fruitToss the raisins in a spoonful of the recipe's own dry flour before folding them in. If the base batter is slack, as steamed brown bread batters tend to be, fruit will otherwise sink to the bottom of the mould during cooking.
- Fold in lastAdd the raisins after the soda has met the sour milk or molasses, and get the batter into the mould promptly. The leavening is chemical and begins working the moment the acid and alkali touch.
- If the base recipe is steamedFruit does not change the timing much. Fill moulds two-thirds full, cover tightly, and keep the water at a steady simmer, topping up with boiling water so the pot never runs dry. Test with a skewer at the centre.
- If it is bakedFollow whatever oven the parent recipe calls for. Raisins near the surface will scorch before the loaf is done, so cover the top loosely once it has coloured.
- KeepingBrown bread of this type is generally better on the second day and slices more cleanly once fully cold. Wrapped, it should keep a few days.
Brown bread in an American baking soda booklet means the New England kind: a dark, dense, faintly sour loaf of cornmeal with rye or graham flour, sweetened with molasses and leavened chemically rather than with yeast. It belongs to the era when soda and sour milk gave the ordinary household a same-day loaf, and promotional baking pamphlets existed precisely to make that point in as many ways as possible. Raisins were a common cheap enrichment: dried fruit kept well on a shelf, cost little, and turned an everyday bread into something that could pass for cake at the Sunday table. The care taken to specify "seeded or Sultana Raisins (seedless)" is a small period detail, since pitting raisins by hand was a familiar and disliked kitchen chore before seedless varieties became the norm.