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Quick Bread (Without Yeast)
1 quart Five Roses flour 1 teaspoon (heaping) cream of tartar 1 teaspoon (level) baking soda ½ teaspoon table salt ½ teacup shortening.
Work the above into a smooth dough with nearly 1 pint of milk or water.
Let stand for 10 minutes. Then mould into loaves. Put in tins and let rise for 10 minutes. Bake in brisk oven.
Rule:
A cream-of-tartar bread from the era when many households still mixed their own leavening rather than buying baking powder. It behaves like a large, plain soda-bread loaf, and the whole thing hinges on speed.
- Work fastCream of tartar and soda begin reacting the moment the liquid goes in, and unlike modern double-acting baking powder there is no second lift in the oven. The two ten-minute rests in the original are generous; get the loaves shaped and into a hot oven promptly or the crumb will be dense.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume. Read as an American quart that is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb (about 450 g); note that in a Canadian book an imperial quart would be nearer 5 cups. Scoop and level rather than packing, since the liquid quantity is given as an approximation anyway.
- Half a teacup of shorteningA period teacup is smaller than a modern mug, usually reckoned somewhere between 4 and 6 fl oz, so this is roughly 1/4 to 1/3 cup (about 55-75 g). Lard or vegetable shortening both suit; butter works but adds water and a little salt.
- Nearly a pint of liquidDepending on whether the pint is American (2 cups) or imperial (about 2.5 cups), that is somewhere between roughly 1 3/4 and 2 1/4 cups; start at the low end and add more only if the dough stays crumbly. Aim for a soft dough that just holds its shape, not a slack batter.
- Brisk ovenBrisk means hot: about 400-425F (200-220C). Preheat fully, since this dough has no yeast reserve to carry it while the oven catches up.
- Homemade baking powderThe heaping teaspoon of cream of tartar with a level teaspoon of soda works as an improvised single-acting powder for this much flour, though it is soda-heavy against the more usual two-to-one proportion. If substituting commercial baking powder, use about 4 teaspoons and omit both.
- Yield and timingEnough for two small loaves in 8x4-inch tins, or one large. Bake 35-45 minutes depending on size, until the crust is well browned and the base sounds hollow.
- The stray word at the end"Rule:" is a printing artefact of the original page, not an instruction. Rule was simply the period term for a recipe.
Before commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable, cooks made their own leavening by pairing an acid with an alkali, and cream of tartar - potassium bitartrate, a crystalline by-product of winemaking - was the standard acid of the nineteenth-century pantry. Recipes like this one, headed "quick bread" and marked "(Without Yeast)" to signal the distinction, gave a household a loaf in under an hour rather than half a day. The Five Roses book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company as a promotional volume for its flour, and its bread section reflects Canadian home baking in the early twentieth century, when a hard wheat flour was still the thing a mill most wanted to sell you.