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Nut Bread
4 cups Five Roses flour 4 teaspoons (heaping) baking powder 1 teaspoon salt ⅙ cup granulated sugar (or 1 cup brown) 1 cup chopped nut meats (walnuts or hickory) 2 cups sweet milk 1 egg (beaten).
Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together, and add the nut meats.
Stir egg and milk together, and add to above. Let raise ¾ hour. Bake 1 hour in hot oven. Don't have too stiff dough.
Be sure to grease pans well. This makes 2 medium sized loaves. Thin buttered slices are delicious for picnics or luncheon. ---Mrs. Dan Lynch, Esterhazy, Sask.
A contributed quick bread from a milling-company cookbook, written for a cook who already knew what a loaf batter should look like. Two instructions in it — the oven heat and the standing time — need translating before you bake.
- The oven is the hingeA "hot oven" in this period is usually reckoned at somewhere around 400-450F, which will set the crust and risk scorching it before the centre of a one-hour loaf is done. Bake at 350F for 50-60 minutes, testing with a skewer in the middle.
- The sugar quantity is doubtful"⅙ cup granulated sugar (or 1 cup brown)" cannot be read literally as an equivalence, since the two figures differ sixfold. One of them is likely a misprint, but which is not recoverable from the text; if in doubt, follow the brown-sugar figure or scale the white sugar up to something nearer it.
- "Let raise ¾ hour"There is no yeast here, so nothing rises in the usual sense. A 45-minute stand hydrates the flour and softens the crumb, but a good deal of the baking powder's lift is spent by then. Fifteen to twenty minutes is a better compromise, or mix and bake at once.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh milk, as opposed to the soured or buttermilk that appears in soda recipes. Whole milk is the closest match.
- Hickory nutsCommon in early twentieth-century North American baking and now rarely sold. Walnuts are the stated alternative; pecans behave much the same and are easier to find.
- Batter consistency"Don't have too stiff dough" is the one note worth heeding — this should be a thick pourable batter that drops heavily from the spoon, not something you knead. If the flour is thirsty, add milk a spoonful at a time.
- Pans and yield"Two medium sized loaves" is not defined here; two 8x4-inch tins are a reasonable modern equivalent for this quantity of batter. Grease them well as directed, or line with parchment; sugary nut breads stick badly.
- SlicingQuick breads with a high proportion of nuts crumble while warm. Cool completely, then wrap and leave overnight before cutting the thin buttered slices the recipe recommends.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to promote its Five Roses brand flour, and much of its contents came from Canadian housewives who mailed in their own recipes — hence the credit to Mrs. Dan Lynch of Esterhazy, Saskatchewan, a town in the southeast of the province, north-east of Regina near the Manitoba border. Baking-powder nut breads like this one belong to the great era of the chemically leavened loaf: reliable commercial baking powder made it possible to produce something bread-shaped in an afternoon without a yeast sponge, and nut breads, date breads and bran breads filled the "fancy bread" chapters of cookbooks on both sides of the border from the 1890s through the 1920s. The suggestion to serve it thinly sliced and buttered for picnics and luncheon places it squarely in the tea-table tradition rather than at dinner, where a nut loaf did the work that sandwiches and cake did elsewhere.