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Milk and Water Bread
1 cup scalded milk 1 cup boiling water 1 tablespoon lard 1 tablespoon butter 2 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm water 6 cups sifted flour, or one cup white flour and enough entire wheat flour to knead Prepare and bake as Water Bread. When entire wheat flour is used add three tablespoons molasses. Bread may be mixed, raised, and baked in five hours, by using one yeast cake. Bread made in this way has proved most satisfactory. It is usually mixed in the morning, and the cook is able to watch the dough while rising and keep it at uniform temperature. It is often desirable to place bowl containing dough in pan of water, keeping water at uniform temperature of from 95 degree to 100 degree F. Cooks who have not proved themselves satisfactory bread makers are successful when employing this method.
A standard early twentieth-century white loaf, softened with milk and enriched with a little fat. The instructions lean on the book's earlier Water Bread entry for shaping and baking, so a few numbers need supplying.
- Yeast cakeA compressed yeast cake of this period is usually treated as roughly equivalent to one packet of active dry yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, though cake sizes varied. Dissolve it in the quarter cup of lukewarm water as written; instant yeast can go straight into the flour.
- Scalding the milkScalding was originally done to kill wild organisms and deactivate enzymes in raw milk. Pasteurised milk needs none of that, but heating it and letting it cool to lukewarm still helps dissolve the lard and butter and warms the dough.
- Liquid temperatureCombine the scalded milk, boiling water and fats first and let the mixture drop to about 105F before the yeast goes in. Added at full heat it will kill the yeast outright.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat flour. It handles liquid differently from white flour, which is why the recipe says "enough to knead" rather than fixing a number. The three tablespoons of molasses add sweetness and colour to the whole wheat version.
- The water bathThe 95F to 100F bath is the hinge of the method and the reason the writer calls it reliable. A modern equivalent is an oven with only the light on, or a turned-off oven with a pan of hot water beneath the bowl. Much warmer than that and the dough rises faster, often at some cost to flavour.
- BakingShaping and baking are left to the book's earlier Water Bread entry, which is not reproduced here; follow it. As a modern guide, bake at 375-400F for roughly 40 to 50 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow and register about 200F at the centre.
- SaltTwo and a half teaspoons across six cups of flour is on the generous side by modern standards but well within range for a plain loaf. Reduce to two if you are using salted butter and want a milder crumb.
- YieldSix cups of flour gives enough dough for two modest loaves, or one large 9x5 inch tin.
Household cookery books of this era treated bread as the test of a competent cook, and the closing remarks here are addressed to whoever did the daily baking. The five-hour, single-yeast-cake schedule stands in contrast to the older overnight sponge, set the night before with a small amount of yeast and left to rise in an unheated kitchen. Reliable commercial compressed yeast, widely distributed in American cities by the 1880s, is what made the faster daytime method practical, and it had the advantage of putting the rise under the cook's eye and at a controlled temperature. The insistence on a measured 95 to 100F water bath reflects the same period's enthusiasm for bringing thermometers and stated numbers into domestic work. Milk-and-water doughs like this one sit between a plain water loaf, which keeps a crisper crust, and an all-milk loaf, which is softer and browns faster.