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Rye Bread
1 cup scalded milk 1 cup boiling water 1 tablespoon lard 1 tablespoon butter ⅓ cup brown sugar 1½ teaspoons salt yeast cake dissolved in ¼ cup lukewarm water 3 cups Five Roses flour Rye meal to stiffen.
Dissolve lard, butter, sugar and salt in hot milk and water. When lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake and flour. Beat thoroughly, cover and let rise until light.
Add rye meal until dough is stiff enough to knead. Knead thoroughly, let rise, shape into loaves. Let rise again, and bake.
A sponge-method rye that leans on white flour for structure, with rye added only at the kneading stage. The original assumes you know your own oven, so the numbers below are the ones it leaves out.
- Yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake of the period is replaced by one packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry yeast. Proof it in the ¼ cup of lukewarm water as written; instant yeast can go straight into the flour.
- Scalded milkScalding is commonly explained as denaturing whey proteins in raw milk that interfere with gluten development; it also served to make raw milk keep. With pasteurized milk most bakers find it unnecessary — warming it enough to melt the fat and dissolve the sugar and salt will do.
- Rye mealThis means coarsely ground rye, closer to today's dark or pumpernickel rye flour than to light rye. Expect to add roughly 2½ to 3 cups; the dough will be stickier and less springy than a wheat dough, which is normal.
- The hingeRye has almost no functional gluten, so all the structure comes from the 3 cups of white flour worked in first. Beat that sponge hard and let it get genuinely light and bubbly before any rye goes in, and stop adding rye while the dough is still slightly tacky — pushing it to a smooth, dry ball gives a dense, gummy loaf.
- Kneading and risingKnead 8 to 10 minutes. First rise about 1 to 1½ hours, shaped loaves about 45 minutes to an hour; rye ferments faster than wheat and slumps if overproofed, so bake when the loaves are not quite doubled.
- OvenBake at 375–400°F for 35 to 45 minutes. Done at an internal temperature of 200–205°F; the crust browns early because of the brown sugar, so tent with foil if needed.
- YieldTwo loaves in 8½ x 4½ inch pans, or two free-form rounds on a sheet. Rye bread slices best the day after baking — cut it hot and the crumb tears.
- FatsThe lard and butter together are for tenderness and keeping quality. All butter works; the loaf will be slightly less soft.
Five Roses was a promotional cookbook issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose flour brand it advertised, and its purpose was to sell wheat flour — which explains why a rye bread here is built on three cups of white flour with rye merely "to stiffen." That is a North American compromise. Rye was the staple bread grain across northern and eastern Europe, where sourdough acidity, not wheat gluten, holds the loaf together; immigrant bakeries in Canadian and American cities kept those darker, sourer breads going while home cooks working from milling-company pamphlets often made something lighter and sweeter. The brown sugar and the pair of fats mark it as an enriched bread: tender, and closer to a sandwich loaf with rye flavour than to a European rye proper.