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Oatmeal Bread
1 cup rolled oatmeal 1 pint boiling water ½ cup molasses 1 quart Five Roses flour compressed yeast cake dissolved in cup warm water or 1 cup home-made yeast 1 teaspoon lard or butter.
Pour boiling water over oatmeal and lard. Let stand 1 hour. Add molasses, salt, yeast and Five Roses flour. Let rise overnight. Shape in loaves, using as little flour as possible. Let rise until light, and bake 1 hour in quite hot oven.
Note-Might be used-1 pint warmed up or left-over porridge.
A straightforward overnight sponge loaf, but the ingredient list and the instructions disagree in one place and the bake time is long by modern standards.
- Salt is missing from the listSalt appears in the method but never in the ingredients. Use about 2 teaspoons for this quantity of dough; without it the loaf tastes flat and the long overnight rise runs faster than you want.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume, so a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb / 500 g of all-purpose. Five Roses was a hard-wheat Canadian flour, closer to modern bread flour than to soft Southern brands.
- The yeast cakeA compressed cake of the period was about 0.6 oz. Substitute 2¼ teaspoons (one packet) of active dry yeast, dissolved in the cup of warm water as written. "Home-made yeast" would have been a household barm, usually built on some combination of hops, potato and flour and kept going in the pantry; ignore that option.
- Cool the oatmeal before the yeast goes inA pint of boiling water poured over rolled oats can still be warm after the hour's standing, especially in a heavy bowl. Check it is below about 110F before adding the yeast, or you risk damaging it.
- Managing the overnight rise"Let rise overnight" assumed an unheated kitchen. In a 70F house the dough will be over-proofed and sour by morning; set it somewhere cool, or refrigerate it and let it come back to room temperature before shaping.
- "Quite hot oven"Read as roughly 400-425F. Bake at that heat for the first 15 minutes, then drop to about 375F " will darken well before the crumb is set, since molasses browns fast.
- An hour is too longDivided into two smaller loaves this dough should be done in 35 to 45 minutes; a single large loaf will take longer. Go by internal temperature: 195-200F at the center. The full hour probably reflects the slower, less steady solid-fuel ovens of the period.
- Shaping a slack dough"Using as little flour as possible" is the real instruction. The oatmeal holds a lot of water and the dough is sticky; wet or lightly oiled hands work better than dusting, which dries the crumb.
- YieldOne large loaf, or two smaller ones (the recipe says to shape them, not to pan them). The molasses keeps it moist for several days and it toasts particularly well.
- The porridge noteA pint of leftover cooked oatmeal replaces the oats and boiling water entirely. Warm it to loosen, and expect to add a little more flour, since porridge consistency varies.
Oatmeal bread belongs to the thrift end of the baking repertoire: a cup of oats and a pint of water stretch a pound of flour, and the closing note " use up last night's porridge " makes the economy explicit. The *Five Roses Cook Book* was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as advertising for its flour and assembled from recipes contributed by Canadian housewives, which is why the brand name stands in for the word "flour" throughout. Molasses-and-oat loaves were common in Scottish-settled parts of Ontario and the Maritimes, where oats were long a staple grain; the sweetener was imported cane molasses rather than sugar. The choice offered between a compressed yeast cake and homemade yeast suggests a moment when commercial yeast was widely available but had not yet displaced the barm crock in every kitchen.