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Poor-Man's Bread
One pint of buttermilk or sour milk, one level tea-spoon soda, a pinch of salt, and flour enough to make as stiff as soda-biscuit dough; cut into three pieces, handle as little as possible, roll an inch thick, place in dripping-pan, bake twenty or thirty minutes in a hot oven, and, when done, wrap in a bread cloth. Eat while warm, breaking open like a biscuit. Each cake will be about the size of a pie.- Mrs. D. B.
A three-ingredient soda bread, closer to a giant biscuit than a loaf. Everything depends on working the dough as little as possible.
- The hinge: barely mix itThe soda begins reacting with the acid in the milk the moment they meet, and kneading knocks the gas out. Stir until the flour is just damp, pat into shape, and get it into the oven immediately.
- A pintTwo cups of buttermilk. Flour "enough to make as stiff as soda-biscuit dough" will land somewhere around 4 to 4 1/2 cups, but add it by feel: the dough needs to be stiff enough to roll an inch thick and hold its shape.
- A hot ovenBy the usual equivalences for the term, roughly 400 to 450F. These flat cakes need heat fast enough to set the crust while the soda is still lifting; a moderate oven risks something dense and pale.
- Dripping-panThe shallow rimmed pan that sat under a roast. A half-sheet pan is the equivalent; line it or the bottoms will color hard before the centers are set.
- Sour milkIn 1877 this meant unpasteurized milk that had soured naturally and was still safely acidic. Do not sour today's pasteurized milk on the counter -- use cultured buttermilk, or milk with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup.
- The bread clothWrapping the hot cakes in a towel traps steam and keeps the crust from setting hard. It is the reason these are meant to be eaten warm; cold, they go tough and dry within hours.
- YieldThree flat rounds roughly nine inches across, an inch thick. That is a lot of bread -- enough for six to eight people at one meal, and it does not keep.
The name is the whole point: no yeast to buy or keep alive, no eggs, no butter, no sugar, nothing but sour milk that would otherwise be wasted and a spoonful of soda. Chemical leavening had only become reliable and cheap in American kitchens in the decades before Buckeye Cookery appeared in 1877, and it offered a way to get hot bread on the table in half an hour without the long commitment of a yeast sponge. The recipe's comparison of each cake to a pie also tells you something about how it was eaten -- broken open at the table and passed, not sliced -- and the attribution to "Mrs. D. B." is typical of the book, which was compiled from contributions by Ohio housekeepers rather than written by a single author.