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Fruit Bread
2 cups sweet milk 2 cakes yeast ½ teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons lard 4 tablespoons sugar 1½ cups fruit cut fine Five Roses flour.
Scald the milk and cool till lukewarm.
Strain in the yeast dissolved in ¼ cup lukewarm water. Beat vigorously into liquid, and let sponge rise. Cream the lard and sugar. Dredge the fruit with Five Roses flour and add to the sponge.
Add sufficient flour to make a soft dough.
Knead thoroughly and set to rise. When light, divide, form into loaves and put in bread pans. When ready, bake in a slightly cooler oven than is required for plain bread. For the fruit in this bread, use either raisins, currants, citron dates. Miss Lumina Chaput, or Paradise Hill, Sask.
A plain sponge-method white bread enriched with sugar, fat and dried fruit. The recipe assumes a cook who already knows how much flour a loaf takes and how her stove behaves, so the two things it leaves out are the flour quantity and the oven temperature.
- The flour is not measuredTwo cups of milk plus a quarter cup of water will take somewhere in the region of 6 cups of all-purpose flour for a soft dough, though the amount is best judged by feel. Add it in stages and stop while the dough is still slightly tacky; fruit breads stiffen as they rise.
- Yeast cakesTwo cakes of compressed yeast correspond to roughly two packets, about 4½ teaspoons, of active dry yeast, although cake sizes varied between makers.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no temperatures. Bread of this period is generally baked hot, around 400-425F; "slightly cooler" would put this loaf near 375F, since the fruit and sugar scorch before the crumb is set. Bake 35-45 minutes, to an internal 190-200F.
- Scalding the milkScalding is usually explained as deactivating something in unheated milk (enzymes or whey proteins) that weakens gluten. Pasteurized milk needs only to be warmed to lukewarm, though scalding does no harm.
- The creamed lard and sugarThe instructions cream them but never say where they go. Work them into the risen sponge along with the salt, before the fruit and the bulk of the flour. Butter or shortening substitutes for lard at the same volume, with a slightly less tender crumb.
- Dredging the fruitTossing the fruit in flour before it goes into the dough keeps it suspended rather than sinking, and stops sticky raisins or dates from clumping. Chop citron and dates fine, as directed, or they tear the gluten during kneading.
- Two rises"Let sponge rise" means until bubbly and collapsing, about an hour. After kneading, rise until doubled, shape, then let the loaves rise until an indent springs back slowly. Enriched, fruited doughs rise more sluggishly than plain bread.
- YieldTwo standard 8½ x 4½ inch loaves.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, one of the great Canadian flour millers, and its contents came largely from the women who bought the flour: recipes were solicited from housewives across the Dominion, and contributions like this one were printed with the contributor's name and town attached. That is why this page ends with Miss Lumina Chaput of Paradise Hill, Saskatchewan, a homestead settlement in the province's northwest. The brand name appears twice in a short recipe, which is the point of the book. Fruit bread of this kind sits between everyday loaf and cake: a plain white dough enriched just enough with lard, sugar and dried fruit to be worth calling "fancy," using raisins, currants, citron or dates because those were the fruits that kept in a prairie pantry through the winter.