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Bread: Dissolve
Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm milk, add sugar and salt, then add the butter, melted. Stir milk into flour gradually. Give the dough a hard kneading, adding sufficient flour to make it soft. Cut and form into rolls, place in buttered biscuit pans, set in a warm place to rise, and bake in a brisk oven.
Buckwheat Cakes. 1 cake yeast, 2 cupfuls lukewarm milk, 1 tablespoonful wheat flour, 1 tablespoonful molasses, teaspoonful salt, 1 quart buckwheat flour.
Dissolve the yeast in the milk.
Rub together the flour, molasses, and salt; add to this the milk containing the yeast, and rub until perfectly smooth, then stir in two cupfuls lukewarm milk or water. To this add sufficient buckwheat flour to make thin batter, which should be rubbed perfectly smooth. Set the batter in a moderately warm place to rise over night. In the morning thin. if necessary, and fry on well-greased griddle. Raised Batter Cakes. 1 cake yeast, 2 cupfuls milk, 2 cupfuls flour, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 4 tablespoonfuls melted lard, 4 tablespoonfuls sirup, Dash salt.
Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm milk. Put into mixing bowl the flour melted with lard, then add sirup, salt, and milk. Add the yeast, and mix until a smooth batter is produced.
Set in a moderately warm place , cover with a cloth, and let it raise over night. In the morning beat well, and fry on well-greased griddle.
English Bath Buns. 4 cupfuls flour, cupful butter, 4 eggs, 5 tablespoonfuls granulated sugar, cupful milk, 1 cake yeast.
Put flour in bowl, make well in center, break eggs in whole, then add butter, milk, and, last, the yeast, which has been previously dissolved in a little warm water. Mix thoroughly and raise. If it is put in a moderately warm place, it will be light in an hour. Turn it out on a well-floured board, and with the tips of the fingers lightly work in 5 tablespoonfuls sugar and add the flavoring. Drop by tablespoonfuls on a buttered baking pan, raise for ten minutes, and bake twenty minutes in a hot oven. Sultanas or chopped almonds may be added.
Lancashire Tea Cakes. 6 cupfuls flour, cupful butter, 2 cupfuls milk, 1 yeast cake, 1 cupful currants, ounces candied lemon, 2 eggs, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, A little grated nutmeg.
Put the sugar and the currants with the flour; melt the butter in the milk; when cool, mix with the beaten eggs and yeast. Add the dry ingredients, beating well, and set to raise. When light, put in cake pans to double its bulk. Bake in a moderately hot oven. These are delicious when fresh, and equally good split and toasted the second day.
Swedish Rolls. 1 yeast cake, 2 cupfuls milk, scalded, cupful butter, + cupful sugar, 1 scant teaspoonful salt, Whites of 2 eggs, 7 or 8 cupfuls flour.
Melt the butter, dissolve the sugar and salt in the hot milk; when lukewarm, add the yeast and beaten whites. Mix in flour to make a drop batter. In the morning add the remainder of the flour and knead twenty minutes. Raise till light; then knead again slightly and roll half an inch thick. Have the edges as straight as possible. Spread all over with a thin layer of soft butter, a sprinkling of sugar, cinnamon, grated lemon rind, and currants. Roll like a jelly roll, cut off slices an inch wide, lay them with the cut side down on greased pans, and when raised bake in a hot oven fifteen or twenty minutes. Glaze with sugar dissolved in milk.
Currant Squares. 1 cupful cream, cupful melted butter, 3 eggs, 1 cupful sugar, cake yeast, 2 tablespoonfuls water, 4 cupfuls flour, 1 teaspoonful powdered mace, 1 teaspoonful powdered cinnamon, 1 cupful currants.
Heat the cream in a double boiler, then stir in the butter, well-beaten eggs, and sugar. Add the yeast dissolved in a little water, the flour sifted with the spices, then the cur- BREAD rants dredged with flour. Beat hard for fifteen minutes. Pour into a shallow baking pan and raise until it is almost doubled in bulk. Bake in a quick oven; when done, sprinkle with powdered sugar and cinnamon. Let the cake cool slightly, then cut into squares with a sharp knife.
Raised Wheat Muffins. 2 cupfuls flour, 1 cupful milk, 1 tablespoonful butter, tablespoonful sugar, teaspoonful salt, 1 egg, yeast cake.
Pour the flour, salt, and sugar in a bowl; boil the milk and add the butter to it. Let the mixture stand till lukewarm, add the milk, butter, and yeast to the flour, and beat well.
Cover the bowl and set in a cool place over night. In the morning the batter will be a light sponge.
Beat the egg and add to this sponge.
Half fill buttered muffin pans with the batter; cover, and let the muffins raise in a warm place. Bake for half an hour in a moderately quick oven.
Raised Wheat Waffles. 2 cupfuls flour, 1½ cupfuls milk, yeast cake, 1 tablespoonful sugar, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, teaspoonful salt, 1 egg.
Boil the milk and, after adding the butter to it, cool the mixture. Put the flour, sugar, and salt in a bowl, add the milk and yeast, and beat well. Raise the batter over night. In the morning add the well-beaten egg.
Have the waffle irons hot and greased. Cook the cakes quickly.
Broiché (French recipe). 4 cupfuls flour, yeast cake, 1 teaspoonful salt, 2 tablespoonfuls sugar, 7 eggs, 1 cupful butter, Warm water.
Sift the flour; into 1 cupful of it pour the dissolved yeast with just enough warm water to make a batter. Set it to raise. When it has doubled its bulk, put in the salt, sugar, melted butter, and 4 eggs.
Beat five minutes, add another egg, beat again, and so on until all have been used; keep beating until the paste leaves the side of the bowl, then set in a warm place for four hours. Turn it out on a floured board, roll in a long piece half an inch thick, spread with softened butter, and fold one end over the center, then the other end over that, until you have three layers. Cut off pieces about an inch wide, lay them on the board to raise, and cover with a towel. When puffy, take each strip between the fingers and thumbs, twist in different directions, coil pyramid shape, letting one point come on top.
Set to raise on a greased pan, bake twenty minutes, and brush over with powdered sugar, moisten with water, and flavor with cinnamon.
A run of yeast-raised breakfast breads and sweet buns, most of them built on an overnight sponge. A few of the ingredient lists have lost their fractions, so read the notes before shopping.
- Yeast cakeOne "cake" of compressed yeast is replaced by one standard packet of active dry or instant yeast, about 2¼ teaspoons. Dissolve it in liquid no hotter than 110F; the recipes' "lukewarm" is exactly right, and milk hot from scalding will kill it.
- Oven temperaturesThe book's terms are approximate: "brisk," "hot" and "quick" correspond to roughly 400-450F, and "moderately hot" or "moderately quick" to roughly 375-400F. The Bath buns at twenty minutes and the Swedish rolls at fifteen to twenty are best at the hotter end.
- Missing quantitiesSeveral lines read "cupful butter," "cupful sugar," "+ cupful sugar" or "ounces candied lemon" with no number. These fractions are genuinely lost rather than recoverable; for enriched doughs of this size, judge by feel against a comparable modern recipe rather than guessing at the page.
- Sirup and molasses"sirup" is simply the period spelling of syrup and the kind is not specified; a cane or light corn syrup is a safe reading. For the buckwheat cakes, an unsulphured molasses rather than blackstrap will suit the batter better.
- Buckwheat batter overnightA quart of buckwheat flour set to rise overnight will sour noticeably, which is the point of the dish. Keep it at cool room temperature, not in a warm spot, or by morning it will be sharply acidic and slack. Thin with milk or water to heavy cream consistency before frying.
- Scalded milkScalding is usually explained as denaturing whey proteins (and inactivating enzymes) in raw milk that would otherwise weaken the dough. With modern pasteurised milk it is generally held to be unnecessary; warm it to blood heat and proceed. Where butter is melted into hot milk, still cool the mixture before the yeast goes in.
- Brioche timingThe recipe's long beating and four-hour warm rest suit hand work with a very soft, seven-egg dough (the twenty-minute knead belongs to the Swedish rolls). A stand mixer with the dough hook reaches the "leaves the side of the bowl" stage in eight to ten minutes. The dough is far easier to roll and twist after a few hours chilled.
- YieldsNone is given. The roll and bun recipes on four to six cupfuls of flour make roughly 12-18 pieces each; the muffin and waffle batters on two cupfuls of flour serve three to four.
These pages belong to the era when the household breakfast bread was still yeast-raised rather than chemically leavened: batter set overnight in the kitchen's warm corner, beaten down and griddled in the morning. Buckwheat cakes were the North American winter standard, often kept going for weeks by saving a cupful of last night's risen batter as the starter for the next. The English entries trace the borrowing that ran the other way, Bath buns being traditionally associated with the spa city of Bath and its eighteenth-century visitors, and Lancashire tea cakes belonging to the northern industrial tea table where they were expected to be split and toasted on the second day. The brioche, misspelled here, marks the point at which American cookbooks began printing French bakery doughs for home cooks, complete with the long butter-and-egg beating that no earlier housekeeping manual would have asked of a reader without a mixer.