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Milk Bread
1 cake compressed yeast 1½ quart milk (scalded, then cooled) 3.quarts Five Roses flour (sifted) 2 tablespoons sugar 2 tablespoons lard or melted butter 1 tablespoon salt.
Dissolve the yeast and sugar in lukewarm liquid. Add 1 quarts sifted Five Roses. Beat until smooth. Cover and set to rise in a warm place about 1½ hours.
When light, add lard, or butter the rest of the flour and the salt. Knead until smooth and elastic. Place in well-greased bowl. Cover and let rise again until double in bulk (about 2 hours).
Mould into loaves, place in wellgreased bread pans, filling half full. Cover and let rise again until double in bulk (about 1 hour). Bake 40 to 50 minutes.
A large straight-dough loaf built on a sponge, sized for a household that baked several loaves at once. The quantities are given by volume in imperial measure and the oven temperature is left entirely to the baker's judgment.
- Set the oven yourselfNo temperature is given because wood and coal ranges were judged by hand. A moderately hot oven is what loaves of this size want — in the region of 400F, eased back towards 375F once the crust has set — and the 40 to 50 minutes the recipe allows is a reasonable total; the crust should sound hollow when tapped from the pan.
- Scale and yieldThree quarts of sifted flour is roughly 12 cups, about 3 lb, and with a quart of milk this should make about four loaves in 8½ x 4½ inch pans. Halve everything for two loaves without changing the method.
- The yeast cakeCompressed (fresh) yeast was sold in more than one size of cake; the small modern cake is about 0.6 oz, and one packet — 2¼ teaspoons — of active dry stands in for that. Fresh yeast keeps only a week or two refrigerated.
- Why the milk is scaldedScalding once served to kill souring bacteria in unpasteurised milk, but it also denatures the whey proteins that otherwise slacken the dough. With today's pasteurised milk the step is optional, though scalded-then-cooled milk still gives a slightly higher, softer loaf. Cool to no more than 110F before adding the yeast, or the yeast will be damaged.
- The sponge stageThe first rise is a sponge — part of the flour only, beaten smooth, left to ferment before the fat and salt go in. Salt is deliberately held back so it does not slow the young yeast. Do not skip adding it later; unsalted bread tastes flat and rises unevenly.
- Rising times are guidance, not lawIn a warm modern kitchen every stage will move faster than the times printed. Judge by the dough doubling and by the dent left when you press it, not by the clock.
- Filling the pansHalf full is correct and worth respecting — a loaf that fills the pan before baking will collapse or mushroom over the sides in the oven.
- Lard or butterTwo tablespoons of fat in three quarts of flour is a lean enrichment; its job is tenderness and keeping quality rather than flavour. Lard gives the softer crumb, butter the better taste. Any neutral oil works if neither is to hand.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal and given away or sold cheaply to Canadian households as advertising for its flour — a common practice among North American millers in the early twentieth century, when brand-name bagged flour was still displacing barrel flour bought loose. Milk bread belonged squarely to that market: a plain white loaf enriched with milk and a spoonful of fat, and the yield suggests a household baking several loaves at once rather than one at a time. The sponge method used here, in which a portion of the flour ferments before the rest is worked in, was standard domestic practice when yeast was less reliable than it is now; the long first rise is often said to have let the baker confirm the yeast was alive before committing the whole sack of flour to it.