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Honey Bread (Boston Cooking School Recipe)
1 yeast cake 1 cup scalded milk ¼ pound butter ¼ pound sugar Pinch of salt 1 egg (well-beaten).
Dissolve yeast cake in scalded milk, then add butter, sugar, salt and wellbeaten egg, then 3 cups Five Roses flour and beat 2 minutes. Add more flour (about 1 cup) to knead and let rise. Again knead, roll to ½ inch thick, spread with honey mixture, roll, let rise and bake in moderate oven.
A sweet enriched dough rolled with honey filling — essentially a honey cinnamon-roll loaf. The original assumes a cook who already knows how yeast doughs behave, so most of the missing detail is timing.
- Cool the milk firstThe one instruction that matters. Scalded milk is near boiling and will kill the yeast outright; let it drop to about 110F before dissolving the yeast cake in it. Adding the butter to the hot milk helps bring the temperature down.
- Yeast cakeA compressed cake of yeast; sizes varied in this period, though the standard modern compressed cake is about 0.6 oz. Substitute one packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast.
- Weights to cups¼ pound butter is ½ cup (one stick). ¼ pound sugar is about ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon granulated.
- The flourFive Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian all-purpose flour, stronger than most modern American all-purpose. Bread flour gives the closest result. The dough should take 3 cups plus roughly 1 more during kneading — go by feel, stopping when it is soft and only slightly tacky.
- The honey mixture is not givenThe book never specifies it here. A workable filling is ½ cup honey creamed with 3 tablespoons softened butter and a teaspoon of cinnamon; keep it thick, since thin honey runs out of the roll and burns in the pan.
- Rising timesNone are stated. Expect 1 to 1½ hours for the first rise until doubled, and 45 minutes to an hour after the loaf is rolled and panned.
- Moderate oven350F. A filled, rolled loaf needs 30 to 40 minutes; tent it with foil if the top colors before the center is set.
- Pan and yieldMakes one 9x5 loaf, or about a dozen cut rolls in a 9x13 pan. Line the pan with parchment — escaping honey sets like glue.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal, built around recipes solicited from Canadian housewives who used the company's flour, and it became one of the most widely distributed cookbooks in the country. The "Boston Cooking School Recipe" tag was a mark of authority: the school, associated above all with Fannie Farmer and her insistence on level, standardized measurements, carried enormous prestige in North American domestic cooking around 1900, and attaching its name lent a recipe scientific respectability. That authority sits oddly beside this particular entry, which gives no rising times, no baking time, and never says what the honey mixture is — a reminder that even the standardizing era still assumed a cook who had made sweet dough before.