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Recipe for Making Bread
3 qts. Gold Medal Flour 2 rounding teaspoons salt 2 tablespoons lard 1 qt. water 2 cakes compressed yeast 2 tablespoons sugar To 1 quart of lukewarm (not hot) wetting (composed of equal portions of water and sweet milk, or water alone) add 2 half-ounce cakes (1 oz.) of Compressed Yeast (or the usual quantity of liquid yeast), and stir until completely dissolved, then add 2 rounding teaspoonfuls of salt and 2 tablespoonfuls of sugar. When salt and sugar are thoroughly dissolved, stir in well sifted flour with a wooden spoon until a dough is formed sufficiently stiff to be turned from the mixing bowl to the molding board in a mass. The quantity of flour used to above wetting should be about 3 quarts; to this flour may be added with excellent results, about 2 tablespoonfuls of lard, if shortening is desired. Knead this dough, adding if necessary a little flour from time to time, until it becomes smooth and elastic and ceases to stick to the fingers or molding board. Then put in a well greased earthen bowl, brush lightly with melted butter or drippings, cover with a bread towel or blanket, and set to rise in a warm place for two hours, or until light. As soon as light, knead well and again place in earthen bowl, covering as before, and set for another rising of an hour, or until light. As soon as light, form gently into loaves or rolls, place in greased bread or roll pans, brush with melted butter or drippings, cover again with towel or blanket, and let stand for one and one-half hours, and then bake. Milk should not be used in any kind of bread without being scalded or brought to boiling point before using. Use Gold Medal flour. Don't be afraid to mix dough soft. Knead thoroughly.
A straight commercial-yeast white bread from a flour-company pamphlet, written when cooks measured flour by the quart and ovens had no dial. The proportions are sound; the yeast quantity and the missing oven temperature are what need attention.
- Yield firstThree quarts of flour to a quart of liquid is a large batch — roughly 12 cups of flour, about 1.5 kg, and something over 5 lb of dough in total. Expect four or five loaves, or fewer loaves plus a pan of rolls. Halve it if you have one loaf pan.
- Measuring the flourFlour was scooped and levelled by volume, and the recipe itself says the quantity "should be about 3 quarts" — it is a target, not a rule. Weigh if you can: start with 1.4 kg, hold back the rest, and add only what the dough demands during kneading.
- The yeastTwo half-ounce cakes of compressed (fresh) yeast is 1 oz / 28 g. Fresh yeast is roughly a third the strength of dried by weight, so substitute about 3 to 4 teaspoons of active dry or 2 to 2¾ teaspoons of instant, depending on which conversion you follow. This is still a fast, generously yeasted dough by modern standards.
- Watch the dough, not the clockTwo hours, then one hour, then ninety minutes assumes a cool kitchen and a blanket over the bowl. In a 70F room with modern yeast the first rise may be done in an hour. Judge by doubled volume and a slow spring-back when pressed.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe says only "and then bake," which tells you it was written for a range the cook already knew. Bake at 400F for the first 15 minutes, then 375F for another 20 to 30, until the loaves sound hollow and read 200-205F at the centre.
- Scalding the milkThe recipe insists milk be scalded or brought to the boil first. Older baking texts held that unheated milk contains a heat-sensitive substance that slackens gluten and weakens the crumb, and scalding would also have killed wild organisms in raw milk. Pasteurised milk has been heated already, so warming it to lukewarm is enough.
- Lard and the greased bowlTwo tablespoons of lard across three quarts of flour is a light enrichment for tenderness and keeping quality; butter or a neutral oil behaves much the same. Brushing the risen dough with fat, rather than dusting with flour, keeps a skin from forming under a cloth cover.
- "Don't be afraid to mix dough soft"This is the line that matters. A slack dough is harder to handle but produces a lighter, moister loaf; the temptation with a wooden spoon and a bowl is to keep adding flour until the mass is stiff and the crumb comes out dense.
Gold Medal Flour was the flagship brand of the Washburn Crosby Company of Minneapolis, one of the mills that made the Upper Midwest the centre of American hard-wheat flour production, and its promotional cook books circulated widely in the early twentieth century. A recipe like this one is doing two jobs at once: teaching a straightforward yeast loaf and reminding the reader, twice in a short text, which flour to buy. Its reliance on compressed yeast — sold in half-ounce cakes and kept on ice — places it after the spread of commercial bakers' yeast in the 1870s and 1880s, when home bakers no longer had to maintain a liquid ferment; the parenthetical nod to "the usual quantity of liquid yeast" acknowledges that some households still did. The emphasis on hard-wheat flour, a soft dough and thorough kneading reflects the mills' interest in showing off gluten strength, the quality that let a high-rising white sandwich loaf become the American standard.