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Nut Brown Bread
¾ cup Graham flour ¾ cup Fives Roses flour 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ cup brown sugar ½ cup chopped walnuts 1 cup sweet milk Pinch of salt.
Mix all together and bake in baking powder can 40 minutes in a moderate oven.
A plain quick loaf from the era when nut breads were baked in whatever cylindrical tin the pantry offered. The measurements are sound; only the vessel and the oven need translating.
- The baking powder canBaking powder was sold in tall cylindrical tins of various sizes; a one-pound tin ran roughly 3 inches across and about 5 tall, giving a cylindrical loaf that slices into rounds. A tall can, a pudding mould or a small loaf pan of similar capacity will stand in; if the substitute is larger, grease it well and fill no more than two-thirds.
- Modern cansIf you improvise with a food can, use a plain steel one and check the interior; many current cans carry a polymer lining not meant for dry oven heat. A small metal loaf pan or a clean coffee tin avoids the question.
- Moderate oven350F. In a deep narrow tin the centre is slow to set, so the loaf may need longer than the stated 40 minutes; test with a skewer to the base of the loaf.
- Graham flourCoarse whole wheat flour, ground with the bran left in. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is the closest thing on a modern shelf, and the loaf is a little softer with it.
- Sweet milkFresh unsoured milk, as distinct from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for soda rather than baking powder.
- LeaveningOne teaspoon of baking powder to 1 1/2 cups of flour is light by current practice; two teaspoons gives a loaf that rises more readily rather than staying dense and damp.
- Batter consistencyA cup of milk to 1½ cups of flour makes a pourable batter, not a dough. Mix only until the flour disappears; extended beating toughens it.
- Yield and servingOne small loaf, about eight to ten thin rounds. It is a tea bread rather than a breakfast bread, best on the second day, buttered, or spread with cream cheese as the period sandwich loaves were.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and Winnipeg to promote its Five Roses brand flour, and among its bread recipes are quick breads that a home cook could turn out between meals without setting a yeast sponge. Nut breads of exactly this type spread through North American cookery in the first decades of the twentieth century, once reliable commercial baking powder made a sweet, cake-like loaf a twenty-minute job of mixing. Baking in an emptied baking powder tin was a genuine domestic habit rather than a novelty: the narrow cylinder cut into round slices that fitted a sandwich neatly, and tea-room sandwiches of nut bread and cream cheese were a fashion of the same years. The recipe pairs Graham flour with the company's white patent flour.