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Nut Bread (Cream one egg with one cup)
Cream one egg with one cup of sugar, two cups milk, four cups of flour (sifted), four teaspoons baking powder, one-half teaspoon salt, one cup nuts (chopped or rolled); stand in pans thirty minutes before baking. Make two loaves or three small ones.
— Mrs. Edith Cornwall Westworth
A plain baking-powder loaf of the sort that filled community cookbooks in the early twentieth century. The original assumes you know your own oven and your own loaf pans, so the two things it leaves out are temperature and time.
- The resting step is the pointThe resting step -- Standing the filled pans thirty minutes before baking gives the flour time to hydrate, which tends toward a coarser, more bread-like crumb; skipping it will likely give a tighter one. Modern double-acting baking powder survives the wait without trouble.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 350F; a hotter oven risks cracking and setting the crust before the centre of a large loaf is done.
- TimingReckon 45 to 55 minutes for two standard 8x4-inch loaves, 30 to 40 for three small ones. A skewer in the centre should come out clean, and the loaf should pull slightly from the pan sides.
- No fat at allThere is no butter or oil in the batter, which is not unusual in fat-free quick loaves of this kind. The loaf will be lean and firm, better on the second day and better still buttered. It also stales fast, so wrap it once cool.
- "Cream one egg with one cup of sugar"Beat the egg and sugar together until pale and thick, then add milk, then the sifted dry ingredients. Stir only until combined; overworking gives tunnels and a rubbery crumb.
- Four teaspoons baking powderThat is a teaspoon per cup of flour, standard for the era and still workable. If your baking powder is more than six months old, replace it rather than increase the quantity.
- The nutsThe recipe does not say which. English walnuts or pecans work; black walnut, butternut or hickory, if you have them, give a more assertive flavour. "Rolled" means crushed under a rolling pin.
- YieldTwo loaves of roughly 8x4 inches, or three small ones. Grease and flour the pans well; there is nothing in the batter to keep it from sticking.
Nut breads belong to the expansion of chemically leavened quick breads that followed cheap, reliable baking powder in the later nineteenth century. A cook who once needed yeast and half a day could now put a sweet loaf in the oven in the time it took to heat it, and recipes like this one, egg-sugar-milk-flour with something stirred in, multiplied through community and fundraising cookbooks. The attribution to Mrs. Edith Cornwall Westworth is characteristic of the form, where each receipt carried its contributor's name and the book doubled as a roster of the village.