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Nut Bread
Set a sponge of one cup of entire wheat flour, one cup of white flour, one-half cake of compressed yeast, one cup of milk. When light add two tablespoons of brown sugar, one teaspoon of salt, one-quarter pound of shelled hickory nuts and enough entire wheat flour to make stiff as can be stirred with spoon. Put in pan, let rise for one hour and bake one hour. - Mrs Charles Brantingham, Rockford.
A sponge-method batter bread from a period when a cook was trusted to know her own oven. The recipe gives no temperature and no yield, so both need filling in.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat flour, sold under that name in the early 1900s. Modern whole wheat is comparable, though it absorbs slightly more liquid, so add the final flour gradually.
- Compressed yeastThe familiar small cake ran about 0.6 oz, though period cake sizes varied, so half a cake is roughly 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Compressed cake yeast is still sold in some markets in 2 oz blocks; about a sixth of one of those is the equivalent.
- The spongeScald and cool the milk to lukewarm before mixing, or use it straight from the refrigerator warmed to about 100F. "When light" means visibly domed, bubbly and roughly doubled, which takes 1 to 2 hours at room temperature.
- Stiff as can be stirredThis is a batter bread, not a kneaded dough. The finished mass should hold the mark of the spoon but still be too slack to handle, and it goes straight into a greased pan.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A loaf of this size and density bakes at 350F; the stated hour is about right for a 9x5 pan, but check for an internal temperature near 200F and a hollow sound when tapped from the bottom.
- Hickory nutsA quarter pound of shelled hickory nuts is roughly a cup. They are rarely sold commercially because the shells are brutal to crack; pecans are the closest relative in flavor and substitute directly, and black walnuts give a sharper version of the same character.
- YieldOne standard loaf. It slices best fully cooled, and being sugar-lean it stales quickly, so it is best eaten fresh or toasted.
Nut breads sit at the point where American home baking was moving away from the long yeast sponge toward quick breads leavened with baking powder, and this recipe belongs to the older camp: the flour, milk and yeast are set to ferment before the sugar, salt and nuts go in, a technique carried over from ordinary household bread. Hickory nuts mark it as regional and domestic rather than commercial. Hickories grow wild across the Midwest and were commonly gathered rather than bought, and a Rockford cook may well have had them for the price of the walk and the labor of cracking them. Collections of this kind were typically assembled from members' contributions, which is why the loaf carries a contributor's name and a town.