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Baking-Powder Breads: Sour-Milk
1/2 teaspoonful salt, 3/4 teaspoonful salt, 1/2 tablespoonful butter, 1/2 cupful sugar, Sour-Milk Graham Bread. 1 egg, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter, 1 teaspoonful soda, 2 cupfuls sour milk, 1½ cupfuls Graham flour, 1½ cupfuls white flour.
Beat the egg with the sugar, put in the melted butter; dissolve the soda in 2 spoonfuls hot water, and add the sour milk. Stir up with the flour and bake slowly one hour.
Griddlecakes. 1 pint sour milk, 2 cupfuls flour, teaspoonful salt, 1 egg, 1 teaspoonful soda.
Mix thoroughly the flour, salt, and beaten eggs; add more flour if needed to make a good batter. Last of all add 1 teaspoonful soda dissolved in 1 tablespoonful hot water. Bake at once on a hot griddle.
Sour-Milk Doughnuts. 2 cupfuls flour, teaspoonful salt, 1 scant teaspoonful soda, 1 scant teaspoonful cream of tartar, Grating of nutmeg, tablespoonful butter, 1 egg, cupful sugar, ½ cupful sour milk.
Sift together the dry ingredients, rub the butter into the flour with the finger tips, add the sugar, well-beaten egg, and milk; beat thoroughly and toss the dough on a floured board. It ought to be a soft dough and it is not easy to handle. Use a knife in turning it over if you have any difficulty. Knead lightly and roll into a sheet. Cut the doughnuts with a ring cutter and fry in boiling fat, putting only about four in the kettle at once. If more are fried at a time, the fat will cool and the doughnuts become greasy.
RECIPES FOR CORN BREAD or Indian corn is a native of the new world and is one of the chief sources of national wealth. It is so commonly used as an article of food, both in an unripe state, as green corn, and as a dry grain, crushed ground as hominy, or as corn meal, and cooked in various forms that it may almost be regarded as the national food of America. In addition to corn meal mush, the well known hasty pudding of our grandmothers, it forms the basis of many of the appetizing modern breakfast foods.
Three sour-milk batters from the era when every household had a crock of milk turning on its own. The chemistry is the same today, but the milk is not.
- Sour milk means cultured buttermilkIn 1900 this was raw milk left to clabber, which soured by lactic acid bacteria into something thick and pleasantly tart. Modern pasteurized milk left on the counter spoils rather than clabbers, so use cultured buttermilk cup for cup, or milk soured with a tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice per cup.
- Why the soda is dissolved in hot waterThe acid in the milk is what raises these breads, and the soda has to be evenly dispersed to meet it. Dissolving it in a spoonful of hot water prevents the bitter yellow-brown flecks you get from dry soda pockets. Once the two meet, the reaction starts at once, which is why the griddlecakes say bake immediately.
- Graham flourWhole wheat flour, coarsely ground with the bran and germ left in, named for Sylvester Graham. Ordinary stone-ground whole wheat is the closest supermarket equivalent; the loaf will be slightly finer in crumb than the original.
- "Bake slowly one hour"A slow oven is generally taken to mean somewhere around 300 to 325F. The recipe names no pan; a greased loaf tin is the obvious choice, and an hour in a slow oven should bring the centre to about 200F. It is a batter bread, not a kneaded one, so expect a dense, moist crumb.
- The griddlecake method is garbledThe instruction lists flour, salt and egg but never says to add the milk. Beat the egg into the pint of sour milk, stir that into the flour and salt, then add the dissolved soda last as directed and bake at once on a hot griddle.
- Doughnut fat temperature"Boiling fat" means 365 to 375F, not actually boiling. The warning about frying only four at a time is the real point of the recipe: crowding drops the temperature, the dough absorbs fat instead of sealing, and the doughnuts turn heavy and greasy. Use a thermometer and let the fat recover between batches.
- Soda and cream of tartar togetherThe doughnuts use only half a cup of sour milk, not enough acid to lift two cups of flour, so cream of tartar supplies the rest. A scant teaspoon of each is roughly equivalent to two teaspoons of modern baking powder if you would rather substitute.
- Handling the doughnut doughThe recipe is honest that the dough is soft and awkward. Chill it for half an hour before rolling, keep the board and pin well floured, and roll to about a third of an inch. Yield will depend on the size of your cutter.
- The corn paragraphThe text breaks off mid-heading into an essay on maize. Nothing after "RECIPES FOR CORN BREAD" is an instruction; the recipes it introduces sit on the following pages of the original.
Sour-milk baking belongs to a household economy that no longer exists. A family keeping a cow, or buying unpasteurized milk from one, always had milk on the turn, and rather than waste it cooks learned to pair its acid with saleratus or soda to raise bread without yeast and without waiting. Graham flour carries the name of Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached coarse unbolted wheat against the fashionable white loaf; by the time this book appeared his name had outlived his crusade and simply meant whole wheat at the grocer's. The unfinished essay on maize that follows is typical of a compendium that moved without warning between formulas and general instruction.