Orme Caldera
2 cups of flour
NUT BREAD
2 cups graham flour 1 egg 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup English walnuts 1½ cups milk 4 teaspoons Royal baking powder 1 cup molasses (or sugar) Sift two flours into basin, add salt, nuts, baking powder, the egg, well beaten; the molasses and milk. Mix well and turn into a buttered tin; let rise for 20 minutes, bake slowly for 20 minutes.
A plain molasses-and-walnut quick bread from a celebrity cookbook, printed with the ingredient columns run together. The list makes sense once you separate the stray heading from the ingredients.
- The scrambled headings"Chocolate Bread Pudding" is a neighbouring recipe title that has collided with this one in the printing. The line "2 cups of flour" belongs to the nut bread: you want 2 cups white flour plus 2 cups graham, which is what "sift two flours into basin" refers to.
- Graham flourWhole wheat flour, coarsely milled and with the bran left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the closest match; standard whole wheat flour works, though the crumb is finer.
- Royal baking powderA brand name of the period; cookbooks of this era often specified a particular maker, sometimes at the manufacturer's prompting. Any double-acting baking powder substitutes measure for measure; 4 teaspoons across 4 cups of flour is at the modest end of the usual rate.
- "Let rise for 20 minutes"There is no yeast here, so nothing rises in the usual sense. The rest lets the graham flour and bran hydrate and softens the crumb.
- The baking time is wrong for a loafTwenty minutes in a slow oven will not set a four-cup batter in a loaf tin. Bake at 325-350F for 50-65 minutes, until a skewer comes out clean; the low temperature matters because molasses scorches. If you divide the batter into muffin tins, 20-25 minutes is realistic.
- Molasses or sugarThey are not interchangeable in texture. A cup of molasses adds liquid and acidity, giving a darker, moister, more tender loaf; a cup of sugar will leave the batter stiff, and you may want a few extra tablespoons of milk.
- English walnutsOrdinary walnuts, as opposed to the native American black walnut. Chop them coarsely and, if you like, toast them first, which the original does not ask for but which sharpens the flavour.
- YieldFour cups of flour makes a large quantity of batter: expect one very large loaf or two medium ones, or upwards of eighteen muffins. Nut breads of this type slice better the day after baking, once the crumb has firmed.
Nut breads belong to the great age of chemical leavening: once reliable baking powder was commercially available in the later nineteenth century, home cooks could produce a sweet loaf in an afternoon without yeast, sponge or proving. Graham flour carries its own history, taking its name from Sylvester Graham, the American dietary reformer whose advocacy of unbolted wheat made coarse whole-meal flour a mark of wholesome eating well into the twentieth century. Graham flour, molasses and walnuts turn up together frequently in American community and charity cookbooks of the period. The brand-name call for Royal baking powder is another period marker, from an era when manufacturers courted cookbook compilers directly.