Harrison Bread
2 cups scalded milk 1 tablespoon lard 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 eggs 1 yeast cake Gold Medal flour Scald the lard and salt with milk; when lukewarm add the yeast broken in small pieces. When cold add eggs well beaten. Make a thick batter with flour. Let rise until light and bake in a loaf. Serve hot and slice at the table like cake.
This is a batter bread, not a kneaded dough: it is closer to a rich yeast-raised cake baked in a loaf pan and eaten warm. Four eggs into two cups of milk makes it very soft, and the texture depends on stopping at a thick batter rather than working toward a dough.
- The hinge: keep it a batter"Make a thick batter with flour" means a mixture that drops heavily from the spoon rather than one you can handle. Expect somewhere around 5 to 6 cups of flour for this quantity of liquid, but go by consistency, not the number; adding enough flour to knead turns it into an ordinary heavy loaf and loses the cake-like crumb the recipe is after.
- One yeast cakeA household compressed yeast cake of this period was commonly about 0.6 oz, though sizes varied by maker. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast. Compressed cake yeast is still sold in some markets if you want the original.
- Temperature orderThe instructions are deliberate: yeast into lukewarm milk, then wait until the mixture is cool before the beaten eggs go in, so nothing curdles or scrambles. Lukewarm here means roughly 95-105F (cake yeast is dissolved cooler than modern dry yeast); cool means genuinely no more than body temperature.
- Scalding milkScalding was traditionally done to deactivate components of raw milk that slacken bread dough; whey proteins are the usual modern explanation. With pasteurized milk it is not needed for safety and the textural effect is much reduced, but heating the milk is still the easiest way to melt the lard and dissolve the salt.
- LardOne tablespoon is a small amount, there for tenderness rather than richness. Butter or a neutral shortening works in its place with no real change.
- Rising"Until light" for a batter this wet means roughly doubled and visibly bubbly, about 1 to 1 1/2 hours in a warm kitchen. Stir it down, turn it into a greased loaf pan, and let it rise again until it crests the rim before baking.
- OvenThe book assumes you know your own oven. Bake at 375F for 40 to 50 minutes in a standard 9x5 loaf pan; the center should read 200-205F. An egg-rich batter browns early, so tent the top with foil if it colors before the middle sets.
- Yield and servingOne large loaf, eight to ten servings. It is meant to go to the table hot and be cut in slices like cake, with butter; it stales quickly, so it is a same-meal bread rather than a keeper.
Egg-rich batter breads like this one sat in an awkward category between bread and cake, somewhere among the tea breads and supper breads meant to be baked in the afternoon and eaten hot. The name has sometimes been linked, speculatively, to one of the Harrison presidents, either the 1840 campaign of William Henry Harrison or the administration of his grandson Benjamin, in the same way that Election Cake and Washington Pie took their names from public figures rather than from any documented connection to them; no early source establishes which, if either. What is clear is the book's purpose in printing it. The Gold Medal Flour cook book was promotional literature from the Washburn-Crosby milling company, and a recipe that calls for flour without specifying an amount, trusting the cook to judge a batter by feel, was exactly the kind of thing a miller liked to publish: it flattered the reader's skill while putting the brand name in the ingredient list.