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Rye Biscuit
1 cup boiling water 1 cup rye flakes 2 tablespoons butter 1/3 cup molasses 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1 cup lukewarm water Flour Make same as Rolled Oats Bread.
A soft, molasses-sweetened yeast roll built on a scalded rye-flake porridge. The original leans on a neighbouring recipe for method, so the sequence and the flour quantity are both left to the cook.
- The hinge: cool the porridgePour the boiling water over the rye flakes with the butter, molasses and salt, then let the mixture stand until it is no warmer than lukewarm before the yeast goes in. Adding dissolved yeast to hot porridge kills it, and this is the one step the abbreviated instruction hides.
- Yeast cakeOne compressed yeast cake of the period is roughly equivalent to one packet of active dry yeast, about 2 1/4 teaspoons. Dissolve it in the cup of lukewarm water (100-110F) as directed and let it stand five minutes.
- Rye flakesRolled rye, sold flaked like rolled oats, still turns up in health-food aisles and Scandinavian groceries. Rolled oats can stand in, but the result is the book's Rolled Oats Bread rather than this.
- Flour is unmeasuredThe original simply says "Flour." Expect to work in something on the order of 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 cups of bread or all-purpose flour, stopping when the dough is soft but no longer sticks to the bowl. Rye flour alone will not carry the rise; wheat flour is what the word means here.
- RisingThe referenced Rolled Oats Bread supplies the method; the usual sequence is one rise in the bowl until doubled, then shape into biscuits, set them close in a greased pan and let them double again. In a modern kitchen at 70F that is roughly 1 to 1 1/2 hours and then 45 minutes, probably longer than an old warm-kitchen recipe would have needed.
- Oven"Biscuit" here means a small soft yeast roll, not a chemically leavened quick bread. Bake at 400F for about 20 minutes, until the tops are deep brown; the molasses darkens them early, so judge by the bottoms and by a hollow sound when tapped.
- YieldThe quantities make roughly 18 to 24 small rolls, or one loaf if you would rather not shape them.
Rye-flake and oat-flake breads like this one belong to the turn-of-the-century interest in whole grains, when milled flakes and rolled cereals were newly cheap, heavily advertised, and promoted as more nourishing than white flour. The technique is older than the packaging: scalding a coarse grain in boiling water to soften it and gelatinise its starch, then building a wheat-flour dough on that porridge, is how cooks got moist, long-keeping bread out of grains that will not develop gluten on their own. Molasses does double duty, feeding the yeast and masking rye's sourness. The instruction to "make same as Rolled Oats Bread" is common in household cookbooks of the era.