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Currant Loaf
Take 1 quart bread sponge (made from Five Roses flour). Break and mix into it 2 eggs, 1 cup sugar, 1½ cup currants,½ cup peel, 1 cup lard, with enough Five Roses flour to make stiff dough. Shape into loaf and place in pan you intend baking in which has been previously well-greased.
Let rise once. Bake in slow oven 1 hour.
A sponge-method sweet bread from a flour-milling company's promotional book, written for cooks who kept a bread sponge going as a matter of course. The instructions assume that habit, so the first point is the one that needs filling in.
- What "1 quart bread sponge" meansA sponge is a loose yeast batter set some hours ahead — roughly equal volumes of flour and warm liquid with yeast, beaten smooth and left to rise until foamy and domed. A quart is 4 cups of risen sponge; the flour and liquid that went into it will amount to rather less, depending on how far it has risen. It should be active and bubbling before you add the fat and sugar, since eggs, sugar and a cup of lard all slow fermentation considerably.
- Slow oven300–325°F. A dough this rich and this large browns fast, and the low heat is deliberate. Bake to an internal temperature of about 190°F rather than trusting the hour; tent the top with foil if it colours before the centre is set.
- Currants are not fresh fruitThese are dried Zante currants — small dried grapes, sold near the raisins. Soak them in hot water or tea for ten minutes and drain well, or they pull moisture from the crumb.
- PeelCandied citrus peel, usually mixed orange and lemon, sold in tubs at Christmas or by weight year-round. Half a cup is about 3 oz; chop it small so it distributes.
- A cup of lardAbout 7½ oz or 200 g. Butter or shortening works, though lard gives the softer, closer crumb the book was after. Have it soft, not melted, and work it in thoroughly before the last of the flour goes in.
- "Enough flour to make stiff dough"Expect somewhere around 3½ to 4½ cups beyond the sponge, depending on how wet the sponge was. Stop while the dough is still slightly tacky — an over-floured enriched dough bakes dry and heavy.
- "Let rise once"The sponge has already done the first fermentation, so this is the final proof after shaping. Give it until nearly doubled and slow to spring back, which with this much sugar and fat can take 1½ to 2 hours in a warm kitchen.
- YieldThe recipe directs a single shaped loaf and a single pan, but the quantities make a large quantity of dough, likely more than one standard loaf pan will hold comfortably. Dividing it between two pans is the safer course and bakes more evenly.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of the great Canadian flour brands of the era, and like most milling-company books it exists to sell flour — hence the brand name repeated inside a four-line recipe. The recipe assumes the sponge-and-dough household bakery: a cook who already had a sponge working for the week's loaves could divert a quart of it into something sweet without starting over. Currant loaf belongs to a long British and Irish family of enriched sponge breads, spotted with dried currants and candied peel, that sit between plain bread and cake; the dried fruit was a pantry staple imported year-round, while the candied peel marked the loaf as a treat for tea or a holiday. The generous cup of lard is a good period marker — in a Canadian farm kitchen of this period, lard was the cheap, plentiful fat, and butter was often a cash product rather than a household one.