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Brown Raisin Bread
1 tablespoon brown sugar. 1½ cups molasses (black) 1 egg 1 tablespoon butter (melted) 1 teaspoon salt 1½ cups sour milk 1 teaspoon soda (dissolved in hot water) 2 cups Graham flour 2 cups Five Roses flour ½ cup raisins.
Beat the white and yolk of egg separately and add the white last. Butter 1 lb. baking powder cans well and fill half full.
Bake in moderate oven.
A quick bread in the Boston brown bread manner, leavened with soda and sour milk and baked upright in cylindrical tins. A few of the original's assumptions need translating.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. Cans of this size need roughly 45 to 60 minutes; a loaf pan runs a little longer. The batter is dark from the start, so judge by a skewer coming out clean rather than by colour.
- The baking cansA 1 lb baking powder can was a plain tin cylinder about 3 inches across. Modern food cans are lined with a polymer coating not meant for dry oven heat, so use straight-sided coffee tins sold for baking, ovenproof cylindrical moulds, or simply a greased 9x5 loaf pan. Half-full is right either way, since soda breads climb.
- Molasses (black)This indicates a dark, strong-flavoured grade rather than a light table syrup. Full-flavour or dark cooking molasses is the closest match; blackstrap alone will read bitter against only a tablespoon of sugar. (Sulphured versus unsulphured is a separate question from grade.)
- Sour milkNaturally soured raw milk. Buttermilk is the direct replacement, or milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar per cup, left ten minutes. The acid is structural here, not flavouring: it is what the soda reacts with.
- Soda dissolved in hot waterUse only a little hot water, a tablespoon or so, and add the soda near the end of mixing; the recipe itself directs that the beaten white go in last of all. Get the batter into the tins promptly, since once the soda meets the sour milk and molasses the lift begins.
- Graham flourCoarsely milled whole wheat, traditionally including the bran and germ. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the nearest thing; ordinary whole wheat works but gives a smoother crumb.
- Five Roses flourThe Lake of the Woods milling company's household white flour, a hard-wheat all-purpose. Any unbleached all-purpose flour stands in.
- Beating the white separatelyFold the stiffened white in at the end and do not stir it back down. It is the only mechanical lightening in an otherwise dense batter.
- YieldThis is a large batch, so expect several 1 lb cans' worth rather than two or three, each filled half full as directed. It slices best fully cooled, and wrapped overnight the flavour settles.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg and distributed in enormous numbers to Canadian households, part of a common early-twentieth-century practice in which flour millers put their brand into the kitchen by way of a free or cheap recipe collection. The book calls for baking a brown bread upright in an emptied baking powder can, a vessel that was on hand in most kitchens and produced neat round slices well suited to buttering. The dish belongs to the older North American tradition of molasses-and-whole-meal breads, generally traced to the New England brown breads that were steamed rather than baked; this version keeps the molasses, the soda-and-sour-milk leavening and the cylindrical shape, but sends it to the oven instead of the kettle, which is faster and gives a crust the steamed loaves never have.