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Milk Twists
Put one ounce and a half of self-raising flour into a basin, add half a tea-cupful of salt, and mix with milk to form rather a stiff paste. Roll out, and make into twists or plaits. Bake in a brisk oven for ten minutes, then brush over with a little milk. Probable cost, 6d.
A tea-bread of the plainest kind, and as printed the proportions cannot be right. Read the quantities before you weigh anything out.
- The salt is a misprintThe salt cannot be right -- half a tea-cupful is on the order of 3 oz of salt, which no dough could carry. A misprint for half a teaspoonful is the likeliest reading, though the error could lie elsewhere in the line.
- The flour is too littleAn ounce and a half would make one twist the size of a finger, yet the recipe gives the cost as 6d. Scaling up to about 1 lb (roughly 3 1/2 cups), with the milk adjusted to suit, gives a workable batch.
- Self-raising flourThen and now it is plain flour with a chemical raising agent already blended in. If you have none, use plain flour with about 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder per cup, plus the pinch of salt.
- Brisk oven425-450F. At that heat ten minutes is right for thin twists; anything thicker than a finger will need twelve to fifteen and should sound hollow when tapped underneath.
- Stiff pasteAdd the milk cautiously and stop while the dough is still firm enough to hold a rolled rope without sagging. A slack dough spreads and the plait loses its definition in the oven.
- The milk glaze goes on lastThe recipe brushes with milk after baking, not before, which gives a soft sheen rather than a browned crust. Do it the moment they come out of the oven so the heat dries the surface.
- Yield and servingA pound of flour makes a modest batch of twists. Chemically raised breads of this kind go stale quickly, so serve them the same day with butter, at tea or with soup.
Twists and plaits of this kind belong to the great Victorian family of plain tea-breads: flour, milk, salt, a raising agent, no fat and no sugar, shaped for looks rather than richness. They became possible on this scale after the mid-nineteenth-century spread of chemical leavening, and self-raising flour is generally credited to the Bristol baker Henry Jones, who patented a version in the 1840s and campaigned to have it adopted by the Royal Navy. The skills such a recipe demands are basic ones: the cook learns to judge a stiff paste, to shape it evenly and to read a brisk oven, and the costing in pence reminds the reader that the whole point of such breads was to put something fresh on the table for next to nothing.