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Apple Bread
a quantity of apples (freshgathered, if possible), and boil them to a pulp. Mix with double its weight of Five Roses flour. Little or no water is required.
Yeast is employed in the same proportion as for ordinary bakings, and after being allowed to rise 10 hours (overnight), it is baked in long loaves. This bread is much eaten in France, and it is recommended for its light and agreeable properties. -Mrs. Mildred Linke, Trenton, Ont.
A recipe given as a proportion rather than a formula, in the manner of contributed recipes of the period. It works, but you have to supply the numbers the original assumes you know.
- The ratio is by weightTwice the weight of flour to the weight of cooked apple pulp. For a manageable two-loaf batch, about 1 lb (450 g) of thick apple pulp to 2 lb (900 g) of flour. Weigh the pulp after cooking and draining, not the raw fruit.
- Cook the apples dryBoil or bake peeled, cored apples with almost no water and drive off the moisture until you have a stiff, spoonable pulp closer to apple butter than to sauce. A wet pulp is often why this dough refuses to come together as a dough at all.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard-wheat household flour from the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, a brand already long established by the time of this book. It was a strong flour, and bread flour is the closer match than a soft all-purpose; it will handle the fruit sugars and moisture better.
- "Yeast in the same proportion as for ordinary bakings"For a long overnight rise, use very little: roughly 1 teaspoon (3 g) instant yeast for 2 lb of flour. A full packet will exhaust itself and sour the dough well before morning.
- What the recipe omitsNo salt is mentioned, and the bread is flat without it -- about 2 teaspoons (12 g) for this quantity. Apples supply some sweetness but not much; a tablespoon of sugar is optional.
- The ten-hour riseIntended as a cool overnight ferment in an unheated kitchen. In a modern 70F room the dough will be over-risen by morning; either retard it in the refrigerator or cut the time to four or five hours at room temperature and judge by volume rather than the clock.
- OvenThe original gives none. Long loaves of this kind want a hot start, 425F, dropped to 400F after the first ten minutes; bake until the interior reaches about 200F. Apple sugars brown fast, so tent with foil if the crust colours early.
- Yield and keepingTwo long loaves. The fruit keeps the crumb moist for several days, longer than a plain white loaf, but it also makes it mould sooner in warm weather.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell its flour, and it was built largely from recipes mailed in by Canadian housewives -- hence the attribution to Mrs. Linke of Trenton, Ontario. Breads extended with cooked fruit, potato or meal have a long history in both peasant and thrifty middle-class baking, since the additive stretches expensive flour and keeps the crumb moist for days. The claim that apple bread "is much eaten in France" was a stock line that circulated through nineteenth-century household manuals and agricultural papers on both sides of the Atlantic, generally traced to accounts of French provincial baking rather than to any single documented source; it appears in print well before this book and is repeated more or less verbatim here.