Nut Bread
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 1 tablespoonful sugar 3 cups sifted flour 1/3 cup sugar 2 tablespoonfuls lard or butter White of one egg 3/4 cup chopped walnuts 1/3 teaspoonful salt WHEN you want Bread-goodness plus, make a loaf of Nut Bread after this recipe. It is a treat that combines deliciousness and big food value. The ingredients specified will make one medium-sized loaf or one dozen rolls. Dissolve yeast and one tablespoonful sugar in lukewarm milk, add one and one-fourth cups flour and beat thoroughly. Cover and set aside in warm place fifty minutes, or until light.
Add sugar and lard or butter, creamed, white of egg beaten stiff, nuts, remainder of flour, or enough to make a dough, and the salt. Knead well, or "throw and roll" as shown on page 15. Place in greased bowl. Cover and set aside for about two and one-half hours to rise, or until double in bulk. Mould into a loaf or small finger rolls, and place in well-greased pans. Protect from draught and let rise again until light--about one hour. Loaf should bake forty-five minutes; finger rolls six to eight minutes.
A plain white dough lightly enriched with sugar, fat and an egg white, carrying three quarters of a cup of walnuts. The schedule runs to four and a half hours and the recipe never names an oven temperature.
- No oven heat is givenNowhere does this recipe say how hot. A moderate oven, 375°F, suits an enriched loaf of this size, and forty-five minutes should bring the centre to about 195°F. The finger rolls, at six to eight minutes, need the oven considerably hotter, nearer 425°F.
- Only the white of the eggThe yolk is not used and is never mentioned again. Beaten stiff and folded in, the white lightens the crumb without enriching or colouring it. The spare yolk keeps a couple of days covered in the refrigerator.
- “Throw and roll”The booklet points to a technique illustrated on a page that the reader of a single recipe will not see. It is the slap and fold: lift the dough, throw it down on the board, fold it over itself, repeat. It suits this dough, which is slack by the time the nuts are in.
- Toast the walnuts and chop them coarseRaw nuts go soft over a long ferment and their skins tint the crumb. Eight or ten minutes in a dry oven first, and pieces left large rather than chopped fine, keeps them distinct in the slice.
- The times are a ceiling, not a targetFifty minutes for the sponge, two and a half hours for the bulk rise, an hour in the pan. Those numbers were taken in a cooler kitchen than most now. Judge the sponge by the moment it falls back and the dough by doubling.
Nut breads were in fashion in American home baking when this booklet appeared, and its own pitch explains the appeal: the loaf is sold as a combination of good eating and, in the copy’s phrase, “big food value”. Food value is the vocabulary of the new nutrition, which reached home cooks through magazines, extension bulletins and advertising, and which taught that foods could be ranked by what they delivered rather than by how they tasted. Nuts did well in that accounting, being fat and protein in a form that kept, and a loaf with walnuts in it could be defended at the table as more than a treat. What is striking is how little else the recipe does. Take out the nuts and the egg white and what remains is close to the book’s plain white bread. The enrichment is almost entirely the walnuts, which is also the cheapest way to make one dough yield two different loaves.