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Bread Cake (Two cups light bread dough one)
Two cups light bread dough, one and one-half cups sugar, half cup butter, three table-spoons sour milk in which has been dissolved half tea-spoon soda, half a grated nutmeg, tea-spoon cinnamon, cup raisins chopped a little and floured; stir all well together, adding fruit lastly; let rise half an hour and bake in a moderate oven.-Mrs. Hartle, Massillon.
A yeast-raised cake built on a chunk of ordinary bread dough, sweetened and spiced after the fact. The method depends on getting the fat and sugar fully worked into the dough, which takes longer than it sounds.
- The hinge: work the dough, don't fold itTwo cups of stiff risen bread dough will not accept a cup and a half of sugar and half a cup of butter by gentle stirring. Beat the softened butter and sugar together first, then tear the dough in and work the mass with a stand mixer's paddle or by hand for several minutes until it is a smooth, slack batter with no ropes of plain dough left. Streaks that survive mixing bake into tough grey seams.
- "Light bread dough"Plain white yeast dough at the fully risen stage, taken from the batch you were making anyway — this is a use-up recipe. Store-bought frozen bread dough, thawed and risen once, works; sourdough will read sharper against the sugar.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk meant naturally clabbered raw milk, mildly acidic. Buttermilk is the direct substitute; three tablespoons of ordinary milk with a scant half teaspoon of lemon juice or vinegar, left five minutes, also serves. The soda reacts with that acid and adds some lift beyond the yeast, though half a teaspoon is more than three tablespoons of sour milk alone would take up.
- Half a grated nutmegThat is roughly a rounded teaspoon of freshly grated nutmeg — a heavy hand by current standards, and deliberate. Pre-ground nutmeg is milder and flatter; if using it, a teaspoon is still reasonable.
- Flouring the raisinsTossing chopped raisins in a spoonful of flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the base. It matters here because the batter is slack. Add them last, as directed, and only fold enough to distribute.
- Moderate oven350°F. Grease a 9x5-inch loaf pan or an 8-inch square pan.
- The half-hour riseAfter the sugar and butter go in, the yeast is working against a heavy sugar load and will move slowly. Half an hour in a warm spot gives a visible puff, not a doubling. Do not wait for more or the structure slackens.
- Baking time and donenessNot given in the original. Expect 45 to 55 minutes in a loaf pan; a skewer should come out clean and the top should sound hollow when tapped. Tent with foil if the sugary crust darkens early.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, about ten slices. It is closer to a spiced yeast bread than a butter cake, best the day it is made or toasted and buttered thereafter.
Bread cake — sometimes called dough cake — belongs to the era when nearly every household baked bread weekly and a cook always had risen dough on hand. Enriching a portion of it with sugar, butter, spice and dried fruit produced a cake without buying or beating eggs, and without the expense of chemical leavening beyond a half teaspoon of soda to sweeten the sour milk. Buckeye Cookery (the Ohio original was the 1876 Centennial Buckeye Cook Book, compiled at Marysville; the 1877 Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was issued from Minneapolis) collected such contributions by name and town, and the Massillon attribution here is typical of the book's method: a network of Ohio housewives sending in what actually worked in their own kitchens. Recipes of this shape thinned out through the twentieth century as home bread-baking declined and boxed cake mixes arrived, but the logic behind them — that the leftover half of a batch of dough is an ingredient, not a scrap — is why they lasted as long as they did.