Home › Breakfast › Scotch Bread
Scotch Bread
Two cupfuls light dough, one half cup butter, one egg, one teaspoonful soda, dissolved in a little hot water, two tablespoonfuls sugar, (heaped). Let it rise three or four hours.
This is a bread-dough enrichment rather than a bread from scratch: you begin with dough already fermented and beat butter, egg, sugar and soda into it. The original assumes you know the rest, so the baking is left entirely to the cook.
- "Light dough" is risen bread doughTwo cupfuls means about a pound of ordinary white bread dough that has already come up once — the batch set overnight or that morning. Any lean white dough works; take it after its first rise, not straight from mixing.
- Why the sodaA sponge left for hours in a warm kitchen turns sour, and the teaspoon of soda dissolved in hot water neutralises that acid as well as giving lift. If your dough is fresh and sweet-tasting, half that amount is plenty; a full teaspoon in unsoured dough tends to leave a soapy taste and a darkened crumb.
- Working the enrichment inHave the butter soft, not melted, and work the butter, sugar and beaten egg into the dough by hand or on a low mixer speed until it is smooth again. It will slacken alarmingly and look broken before it comes together — keep going.
- SaltNone is called for, presumably because the base dough was already salted. If you are using an unsalted sponge, add half a teaspoon.
- The three or four hoursThat timing belongs to an unheated kitchen and a heavily enriched, soda-dosed dough. In a modern room at 70F, expect roughly 1.5 to 2 hours after shaping — judge by the dough nearly doubling, not by the clock.
- Baking, which the original omitsThe recipe gives no oven direction whatever, so this is a modern suggestion: shape into one small loaf pan or a dozen rolls and bake at 350F, 35 to 45 minutes for a loaf or 20 to 25 for rolls, until the internal temperature reaches about 195F.
- YieldOne 8-inch loaf, or a dozen breakfast rolls. It is best the day it is baked and very good toasted the next.
Recipes of this kind — sweetened, buttered bread dough given a second life as a breakfast loaf or a "raised cake" — fill nineteenth-century American household books, because a household that baked its own bread always had dough on hand and no reason to start a separate batter. The soda is the tell: it marks a period when long, cool, natural fermentation was standard and cooks are often said to have corrected the resulting sourness chemically, a habit generally associated with the growing availability of commercial saleratus in the nineteenth century. The name is looser than it looks. This is not Scotch shortbread, and despite the label such breads are generally better understood as part of a broad Anglo-American family of enriched raised breads to which cookbook writers attached national names somewhat freely; the attribution here should be taken as traditional rather than documented.