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Baking-Powder Breads: Sift
BAKING-POWDER BREADS Sift together the flour and salt, then gradually beat in the milk and egg. Beat two minutes with a Dover beater and bake about half an hour in gem pans, buttered, in a fast oven.
Oat Cakes (Scotch recipe). 2 cupfuls Canadian oatmeal, 1 teaspoonful lard, teaspoonful salt, Water. 'Put oatmeal in a mixing bowl; rub in the salt and shortening, add enough water to make a stiff dough, dust the bread board with oatmeal and roll out thin; cut the cake into a round big enough to fit a griddle and slip it carefully on to the hot iron.
Before it begins to bake, cut the round into quarters. Bake until crisp and delicately brown, and if they do not seem quite hard enough, set the cakes in the oven until thoroughly dried out.
BREADS MADE FROM SOUR MILK Milk or cream used for baking is best when it sours quickly and does not separate, but remains thick and smooth. The usual measurement to use in every recipe where lightness is desired is 1 level teaspoonful soda to 2 cupfuls sour milk or 1 cupful molasses. Sometimes the milk is sour, but not loppered; then use it in gingerbread or brown bread, where there is molasses enough to complete the acidity, or let it stand for a few hours in a warm place to lopper.
The more acid the milk is, the more soda it will require. Never use milk which has turned bitter or moldy. If you are lucky enough to possess sour cream, cut down in each recipe 2 tablespoonfuls butter to 1 cupful sour milk, else the mixture will be too rich.
Woodlawn Brown Bread. 1 teaspoonful soda, cupful molasses, teaspoonful salt.
This page is a run of fragments from a longer chapter, and the printing has swallowed most of the fractions. Treat the Scotch oat cakes as the one complete, workable recipe here.
- Missing fractionsWhere the text reads "teaspoonful salt" or "cupful molasses" with nothing in front of it, a fraction has dropped out of the type — almost certainly ½ or ¼. The Woodlawn Brown Bread entry is only a partial ingredient list with no method, so there is nothing to follow.
- Fast ovenFor the gem-pan batter, a "fast" or quick oven is roughly 400-450F. Half an hour at that heat suits deep gem pans; shallower modern muffin tins will need less time, so check them early.
- Gem pansCast-iron gem pans have differently proportioned cups from a modern muffin tin. A twelve-cup muffin tin works, but butter it heavily as directed -- the batter as printed carries no fat of its own.
- Dover beaterA Dover beater is a hand-cranked rotary egg beater. Two minutes with it is roughly one minute with an electric hand mixer on medium, or two minutes of brisk whisking. The point is aeration.
- Canadian oatmealThis means dry-milled medium or pinhead (steel-cut) oatmeal, not rolled oats. Rolled oats will not roll out into a coherent sheet; use medium oatmeal, or pulse steel-cut oats briefly to break them down.
- The hinge in the oat cakesAdd water a spoonful at a time and stop while the dough is still stiff — a wet oatcake dough cannot be rolled thin and will steam rather than crisp. Score the round into quarters before it sets on the griddle, then finish the farls in a 300°F oven until they snap rather than bend.
- Sour milk and "loppered"Loppered means clabbered — thickened and set. Modern pasteurized milk does not clabber reliably; it spoils instead. Use cultured buttermilk cup for cup, or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup, and disregard the advice about leaving milk in a warm place.
- The soda ratioOne level teaspoon of soda to two cups of sour milk, or to one cup of molasses, is still the working rule for sour-milk quick breads. Mix and get the batter into the oven promptly; the gas is released the moment acid meets soda.
- YieldTwo cups of oatmeal makes one large griddle round -- four farls, enough for two or three people with cheese. No quantities survive for the gem batter, so no yield can be given for it.
Scotch oat cakes belong to a baking tradition older than ovens in most Scottish kitchens: a stiff oatmeal paste rolled thin, fired on a girdle (griddle) over the hearth, then hardened by the fire's edge, and cut into the four wedges still called farls. Oats grew where wheat would not, so oatmeal did the work of flour across the north of Britain, and "Canadian oatmeal" in an American book of this period appears to signal a coarse dry-milled grade rather than rolled oats. The surrounding notes on sour milk are the more revealing part of the page. Before household refrigeration, milk soured as a matter of course, and a cook who understood the difference between clean clabbered milk and milk that had turned bitter or moldy could turn a daily nuisance into leavening -- soda plus lactic acid, or soda plus molasses, being a cheap domestic alternative to commercial baking powder.