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Baking-Powder Breads: Calumet
Batter Bread. 2 eggs, 1 cupful cornmeal, 1 cupful milk, 1 tablespoonful butter, melted, cupful white flour, ½ teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder.
Melt the butter over hot water; separate the eggs; beat the yolks 3 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking slightly; add the milk, butter, cornpowder, teaspoonful salt, 1½ cupfuls milk.
Sift the baking powder, salt, and flour together, rub in the butter with the tips of the fingers, then add the milk, and beat to a soft dough.
Grease a baking pan, lift a level tablespoonful of the dough and drop it into the pan, having each biscuit an inch apart, and bake in a hot oven. This is an excellent recipe to use when one is in a hurry and there is not time to make a biscuit which has to be rolled out and cut.
Flannel Cakes. 1 tablespoonful butter, 2 cupfuls milk, 2 eggs, meal, flour, and salt. Beat thoroughly, add the baking powder, beat again, and fold in, carefully, the whites of the eggs beaten to a stiff froth. Bake in greased shallow bak. ing pan in a moderate oven thirtyfive minutes. Cut into squares, and serve warm.
Shortcake. 2 cupfuls flour, teaspoonful salt, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 4 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 cupful milk. 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder.
Sift together all the dry ingredients, rub in the butter with the tips of the fingers, then wet with the milk to a soft dough. Drop it on a floured baking board and, handling it just as little as possible, roll and 1 teaspoonful salt, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK pat into two round cakes, which will fill a deep pie plate. Drop in one cake of the dough, brush with melted butter, and lay the other one on top of it. Bake until crisp, brown, and puffy. Split and between the cake and on top spread any fruit which is in season. Strawberries, of course, make a most delicious shortcake. Besides this, peaches can be used, red raspberries, cherries, fresh apricots, oranges, or a blend of oranges and bananas, while shortcake filled with stewed prunes or well-seasoned apple sauce is not to be despised.
Chipped pineapple mixed with bananas and oranges makes a delicious filling. In every case, have it juicy by leaving the fruit covered with sugar to stand for an hour in a cool place before it is served.
Graham Biscuits. a 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 cupfuls Graham flour, 1 cupful white flour, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful sugar, 3 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 2 cupfuls milk.
Mix thoroughly, and chop into the mixture 2 tablespoonfuls butter. Add the milk, and if the mixture is then too stiff to handle, add enough water to make it a soft dough. Turn upon a floured board, roll out and cut into biscuits, handling as little and as lightly as possible. Bake in a steady oven.
Waffles. 2 eggs, 1 cupful milk, 1½ cupfuls flour, 1 tablespoonful melted butter, teaspoonful salt, 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder.
Beat the yolks of the eggs light; add alternately, and beating in well, the milk and flour. When these ingredients are mixed, add the butter, baking powder, salt, and whipped whites of the eggs.
Sally Lunn. 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 2 cupfuls sweet milk, 3 eggs, 6 cupfuls flour, 3 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder, 1 teaspoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful sugar.
Warm the butter in the milk; pour over the eggs, beaten light; then stir in a little at a time, and beating continuously, the flour, with which has been sifted the baking powder, salt, and sugar. Turn into a greased cake mold, and bake in a steady oven.
Egg Biscuits. 3 cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 eggs, 1 tablespoonful lard, 1 cupful sweet milk, 1½ teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder.
Sift the flour, add the salt, sugar, eggs (beaten well), lard, milk, and baking powder. Work to a smooth dough, roll half an inch thick, cut in large biscuits, rub over with sweet milk, lay on buttered tins, and bake brown in a quick oven.
Corn Cakes. 2 cupfuls cornmeal, 1 teaspoonful salt, 3 eggs, 1 cupful sweet milk, 1 teaspoonful Calumet baking powder.
Put the meal in a bowl, mix with salt, and pour over it enough boiling water to moisten the mass; cover for five minutes or an hour, as convenient. Beat the eggs separately, add a cup of sweet milk to the yolks, and pour over the scalded meal; mix well, add the baking powder and the beaten whites of the eggs. Grease a griddle with bacon drippings, and fry. Vienna Biscuits.
BAKING-POWDER BREADS 2 teaspoonfuls Calumet baking powder. teaspoonful salt, 4 cupfuls flour, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful lard, 1½ cupfuls milk.
Sift the baking powder and salt with the flour; mix thoroughly with the butter and lard; wet with the milk; turn out on a floured bread board, and knead smooth; roll into a sheet half an inch thick, and cut with a biscuit cutter. Bake at once in a quick oven.
A run of quick-bread formulas from a baking-powder company's promotional cookbook, all built on the same principle: chemical leavening, minimal handling, immediate baking. A few conversions and one or two habits of the period need translating.
- Oven temperatures"quick oven" and "hot oven" both mean a high heat, roughly 425-450F; "moderate oven" is around 350F. "Steady oven" is not a fixed setting: it means an even heat that is not allowed to fluctuate, and no particular temperature can be assigned to it. The biscuits want the high end; the baked batter bread and the Sally Lunn mold are better at 350-375F.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was a phosphate-type powder, later marketed as double-acting, and broadly comparable in strength to modern baking powder, so the quantities can be taken more or less at face value. Several of the amounts here are generous by current standards, and a heavy hand with baking powder can leave a faintly metallic taste.
- Missing fractionsSeveral measurements have lost their fractions in printing and read as a bare "cupful" or "teaspoonful", and in places two ingredient lists have run together. Shortcake's flour is given plainly as 2 cupfuls; it is the white flour in Batter Bread that cannot be reconstructed with confidence. Where salt is unqualified, the amounts elsewhere on the page suggest roughly 1 teaspoonful to 2 or 3 cupfuls of flour.
- Sweet milk and Graham flour"Sweet milk" simply means fresh milk, as against buttermilk or soured milk, and needs no substitution. Graham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ; ordinary stoneground whole-wheat is the closest current equivalent.
- Handling the shortcakeThe instruction to handle the dough as little as possible is the hinge of every biscuit and shortcake here. Mix only until the flour is damp, pat rather than knead, and get it into the oven at once, since the leavening starts working the moment the milk goes in.
- Butter rubbed in with the fingertipsCold butter and quick fingers, or a pastry cutter, keeps the fat in flakes rather than melting it into the flour. Warm hands defeat the whole method; the flakes are what make the layers.
- Corn cakes: scalding the mealPouring boiling water over the cornmeal gelatinises the starch and softens the meal, which is why the cakes come out tender rather than gritty. The recipe treats five minutes and an hour as equally acceptable ("as convenient"), so the longer soak is optional.
- Waffles and griddle workA modern waffle iron at its medium-high setting takes about four minutes per waffle; the batter as given makes roughly four to six. Bacon drippings on the griddle for the corn cakes are worth keeping for the flavour, though any neutral fat works.
- YieldsNone is given. The two-cup-flour biscuit and shortcake doughs feed four to six, the six-cup Sally Lunn fills a large tube or bundt mold and serves eight to ten, and the batter bread baked in a shallow pan cuts into about nine squares.
This page comes from a cookbook of the kind that flourished in the United States between the 1890s and the 1920s, when competing baking-powder firms fought for kitchen loyalty by publishing recipes in which their own brand appeared in every ingredient list. Calumet, founded in Chicago in the late 1880s, was one of the phosphate powders that displaced older combinations of saleratus and sour milk, and its selling point was reliability: a cook no longer had to judge how much soda a given batch of buttermilk needed. The recipes themselves are older than the powder. Sally Lunn was a yeast-raised English cake before it was a baking-powder one, and shortcake, batter bread and corn cakes all descend from hearth baking; what the book demonstrates is how chemical leavening rewrote them into things that could be mixed and baked quickly, though yeast bread remained ordinary in American homes well past 1900. The shortcake note that strawberries are "of course" the best filling, followed by a long list of alternatives, is a reminder of how seasonally bounded fruit still was.