Cocoa Bread
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 2 cups milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 5 1/2 cups sifted flour 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 cup cocoa 1/4 cup butter 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoonful salt COCOA Bread is a delightful Bread-delicacy. If desired, nuts and fruit may be added for greater richness. Tempting buns may also be made from this dough mixture and decorated with chocolate frosting. For particularly delicious sandwiches, use Cocoa Bread.
Dissolve yeast and one tablesponful sugar in lukewarm milk; add three cups of flour and beat until smooth. Cover and set aside to rise in warm place until light--about one and one-half hours, then add butter and sugar creamed, eggs well beaten, cocoa, remainder of flour, or enough to make soft dough, and salt. Knead lightly, place in greased bowl. Cover and set aside in warm place, free from draught, until double in bulk--about two hours. Mould into loaves; place in well-greased Bread pans, filling them half full. Cover and let rise again until light--about one hour. Bake forty to forty-five minutes. This recipe makes two loaves.
A white-bread sponge enriched at the second stage with butter, sugar, eggs and cocoa. It behaves like a sweet yeast dough, not like a cake, and the cocoa is the only ingredient that needs thinking about.
- One cake of yeastOne cake of Fleischmann's compressed yeast is about 2 1/4 teaspoons of modern active dry yeast, or one 7g sachet. It goes into the cooled milk with a spoonful of sugar exactly as written. Cooled matters: milk much above 110°F kills the yeast it is meant to wake.
- Scalding is now optionalMilk was scalded because raw milk needed it. Milk from a carton has been pasteurized already, so warming it to lukewarm does the job. Anyone who does scald should let it come back down properly before the yeast goes anywhere near it.
- Cocoa means unsweetened cocoa powderNot drinking chocolate and not a sweetened mix. Half a cup of it is a dry ingredient and behaves partly like flour, and it arrives at the same moment as the butter, sugar and eggs. Hold back the last half cup of the measured flour and add it only if the dough refuses to come together.
- A dark loaf gives no crust signalCocoa hides browning, so the usual look of a finished loaf is unavailable here. Judge doneness by an internal temperature around 190°F, or by the hollow knock on the bottom of a turned-out loaf, and not by color.
- Half-full pansFive and a half cups of flour making two loaves means modest loaves, and the instruction to fill the pans half full is deliberate. An enriched dough crowded into a small pan mushrooms over the rim and tears along the sides during the last rise.
The booklet exists to sell compressed yeast, and cocoa bread shows the strategy plainly: every additional thing a household could be persuaded to raise with yeast was another cake sold that week. No tradition stands behind this loaf and the copy does not claim one. Instead it reaches for uses, proposing the bread for sandwiches and offering nuts, fruit and chocolate frosting as further reasons to mix the dough at all. The sandwich suggestion is advertising rather than advice; a sweetened chocolate loaf is a strange bed for ham. What the recipe does record is cocoa arriving in the American sweet dough at a point when powdered cocoa had stopped being a confectioner's material and become an ordinary grocery item, cheap enough to put half a cup of it into a bread without the quantity seeming extravagant.