Bran Cake
1 cup lukewarm milk 1 cake compressed yeast 1/2 pound sifted pastry flour (2 cups well shaken down) 1/2 cup of a lardlike vegetable shortening 1 cup brown sugar 1 egg 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups bran (3 ounces) 1/2 cup raisins 1/2 cup dried currants 1/2 cup broken walnut meats 1 teaspoon vanilla flavoring Dissolve the yeast cake in the warm milk, stir in the flour, and beat well. Set this sponge in a warm place to rise. Wash the raisins and currants, boil them in a little water till plump, and drain. Beat the shortening with a spoon till it is creamy. Beat the sugar into the shortening, and continue the beating till the mixture is light and creamy, then add the egg and beat till the mixture is stiff. When the sponge is light, beat this mixture into it, and beat in the salt and bran. Beat the whole well together, then stir in the raisins, currants, and nuts. Pour into an oiled bread tin, and set in a warm place to rise. Let it rise about one-half inch. Bake for about one hour in a slow oven.
This recipe cannot be made successfully with oil as shortening. It requires a hard shortening. There are several lardlike vegetable shortenings on the market. Some are made from cottonseed oil, some are cocoanut fat.
A yeast-raised bran loaf rather than a chemically leavened cake, built on a sponge and enriched with fruit and nuts. The method is straightforward; the variables are the yeast, the shortening and the oven.
- Slow ovenBake at 300-325F for about an hour. A bran and brown-sugar batter this dense browns quickly on the outside, so the low temperature is doing real work here — resist raising it to shorten the bake.
- Compressed yeastOne cake of compressed yeast is roughly 0.6 oz fresh yeast, equal to about 2 1/4 teaspoons (one packet) of active dry. Dissolve dry yeast in the lukewarm milk the same way the recipe directs for the cake.
- The shortening note is the hingeThe final paragraph is not filler. A solid fat creamed with the sugar carries air into a batter that has very little gluten structure; liquid oil will not hold it and the loaf comes out heavy. Use vegetable shortening or, if you prefer, unsalted butter.
- Weights and volumesHalf a pound of pastry flour is 2 cups as the book says, so weigh rather than scoop if you are substituting another flour: 8 oz. The 2 cups of bran at 3 ounces points to unprocessed wheat bran rather than a bran breakfast cereal.
- Plumping the fruitBoiling the raisins and currants briefly keeps them from drawing moisture out of the loaf. Drain them well and pat dry, or the wet fruit will slacken the batter.
- Two rises, one shortThe sponge rises until light, roughly an hour in a warm room. The loaf itself is only allowed to rise about half an inch in the tin — this is a deliberately tight proof, so do not wait for it to double.
- Tin and yieldAn 8x4 or 9x5 in loaf pan, oiled. One loaf, about ten to twelve slices. Test with a skewer at the centre; bran loaves stay moist and can read underdone by touch alone.
Bran had a particular moral standing in early twentieth-century American cookery: promoted by dietary reformers as a corrective to the era's very white, very refined flour, it turned up in muffins, gems and loaves that were as much regimen as pleasure. The frank instruction to use "a lardlike vegetable shortening", together with the aside about cottonseed and coconut fats, suggests a date after such commercial shortenings had become available but while they were still unfamiliar enough to need explaining. The yeast sponge, rather than baking powder, marks the recipe as closer to a sweet bread than to what a modern reader means by cake.