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Baking Powder Bread
Sift together thoroughly 1 quart Five Roses flour, 1 teaspoon salt, ½ teaspoon sugar, and 8 teaspoons baking powder.
Add enough water to make a stiff dough (about 2 cups). Stir together quickly with a large spoon. Then turn it immediately into a well-greased brickshaped baking pan, and bake at once for ¾ 3/4 hour in a hot oven, covering with paper the first ¼ hour to prevent crusting too soon. Have the oven heated right before beginning to mix the bread, and have the pan greased and ready.
A plain quick-bread loaf that stands or falls on speed: the baking powder begins working the moment water hits the flour, so every minute between mixing and oven costs you rise.
- The hinge: no waitingHave the oven fully preheated and the pan greased before the water goes in, exactly as written. A stiff baking-powder dough left standing on the counter will slump and bake dense, because most of the gas escapes before the crumb sets.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in this period: 1 quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb / 500 g of all-purpose. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian flour, and may take up a little more water than some modern all-purpose flours, so start with 1¾ cups water and add the rest only as needed.
- Eight teaspoons of baking powderThat is about 2 teaspoons per cup of flour, roughly double the modern norm of 1 to 1¼. Early twentieth-century powders varied in strength and lost potency on the shelf. With fresh double-acting powder, expect a soapy metallic edge; 4 to 5 teaspoons is closer to today's practice.
- A hot ovenIn period usage this is generally taken as roughly 400-425F (200-220C). The loaf needs the initial blast to set the crumb before the leavening is spent.
- Covering with paperLay a sheet of parchment or loosely tented foil over the pan for the first 15 minutes so the top does not seal and crack before the loaf has finished rising. Remove it for the remaining half hour to brown.
- The brick-shaped panRoughly the equivalent of a modern loaf tin, around 9 x 5 inches. Grease it heavily; there is no fat in the dough and the crust will otherwise weld itself to the sides.
- Doneness and yieldOne loaf. Three-quarters of an hour is about right, but check for an internal temperature of 200-205F, or a hollow sound when the turned-out loaf is tapped underneath.
- Eat it the day it is madeWith no fat, no egg and no yeast fermentation, this stales within hours. Leftovers are best toasted or used for a bread pudding.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Keewatin as a promotional volume for its Five Roses brand flour, and it became one of the most widely owned kitchen books in Canadian homes in the early twentieth century. A baking-powder bread of this kind belongs to the family of quick breads that spread through North American cookery after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century; it let a household put a loaf on the table in under an hour without keeping a yeast sponge alive. The insistence on having the oven hot and the pan ready before mixing also reflects the wood- and coal-fired ranges of the period, where getting the fire to the right point was the slow part of the job.