Bread: Knead
Knead again, shape into loaves, raise, and bake.
Oatmeal Bread. cupful rolled oats, 1½ cupfuls flour, 2 cupfuls boiling water, 1 yeast cake, tablespoonful salt, 1 tablespoonful butter, cupful molasses.
Put the oatmeal into a bread raiser, pour the boiling water over and let stand until lukewarm; then add salt, butter, dissolved yeast cake, and molasses; stir in the flour, beat thoroughly, and set it to raise in buttered bread pans. When it has almost doubled its bulk, bake.
Nut Bread.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK 1 cupful entire-wheat flour, 1 cupful white flour, cake yeast, 1 cupful milk, 2 tablespoonfuls brown sugar, 1 teaspoonful salt, + pound shelled hickory nuts.
Set a sponge of the wheat flour, white flour, yeast, and milk; when light, add sugar, salt, hickory nuts, and enough entire-wheat flour to make as stiff as can be stirred with spoon. Put in the pan, raise, and bake one hour.
Rye and Indian Bread. 2 cupfuls yellow cornmeal, cupful yeast, cupful molasses, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful soda, 2 cupfuls rye meal.
Put the cornmeal into a mixing bowl and scald with boiling water; after ten minutes mix to a soft batter with cold water. When lukewarm, add the yeast, molasses, salt, soda, and 2 cupfuls rye meal. Beat thoroughly, cover with a pan, and set in a warm place to rise over night.
When the surface cracks open, stir it down, then grease and flour a pan, turn in the dough, smooth over the top, and sprinkle evenly with flour to prevent crust from forming. Let it rise again until cracks appear, then bake it in a moderate oven from two to three hours, covering with a tin lid after the first hour.
Fruit Bread. 2 cupfuls sweet milk, 2 cakes yeast, teaspoonful salt, 4 tablespoonfuls lard, 4 tablespoonfuls sugar, 1½ cupfuls fruit, cut fine, Flour.
Scald milk and cool to lukewarm; strain in the yeast dissolved in one quarter cupful lukewarm water.
Four yeasted breads from the era of the compressed yeast cake and the wooden bread raiser. The methods are sound; the quantities and equipment need translating.
- Yeast cake to modern yeastOne compressed yeast cake of the period is roughly equivalent to one packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry yeast, though the size of commercial cakes varied. Where the text says "cupful yeast" (Rye and Indian Bread) it most likely means liquid barm or a homemade yeast starter rather than a compressed cake; treat that loaf as a sponge-and-starter formula and expect to substitute about a cup of active sourdough starter or a poolish.
- A bread raiserA covered tinned or earthenware pail with a lid, used to hold dough at warm room temperature. Any large bowl with a cloth or lid does the same work; the point is a draught-free spot around 75-80F.
- Moderate ovenCommonly taken as around 325-350F. The rye and Indian loaf is a dense, wet, steam-set batter rather than a kneaded loaf, which is why the recipe allows two to three hours at that heat.
- The tin lid on the rye and Indian breadCovering after the first hour is the hinge of that recipe. Molasses and cornmeal brown fast, and without the cover the crust burns long before the interior sets. A sheet of foil or an inverted pan does the job.
- Rye meal and Indian meal"Indian" always means corn. Rye meal is coarser than modern rye flour; a medium or dark rye flour is the nearest supermarket equivalent, and the loaf will be slightly less gritty than the original.
- Entire-wheat flourWhole-wheat flour. Some period entire-wheat was milled finer, with the coarsest bran sifted out, so it can behave differently from today's stone-ground; if the nut bread dough feels tight, hold back a few tablespoons of the final flour addition.
- Hickory nutsRarely sold shelled, and expensive when they are. The pecan is itself a hickory and is the closest substitute in flavour and texture. Toast them before folding in.
- Rolled oatsOld-fashioned rolled oats, not instant. The boiling water is there to soften them and gelatinise the starch, so let the mixture cool to genuinely lukewarm before adding yeast.
- YieldNo yields are given, and the fruit bread's flour is unmeasured; note that the oatmeal bread is set to rise in "bread pans", plural. All benefit from being cooled completely before slicing; the molasses breads in particular are gummy while warm.
These four loaves are a compact picture of what American home bakers did with cheap grain around 1900. Rye and Indian bread is the direct descendant of colonial "thirded" bread — rye, cornmeal and whatever wheat was affordable — which in New England became the steamed or slow-baked brown bread eaten with baked beans; the long bake and the covering lid are holdovers from the brick oven's falling heat. Oatmeal and molasses bread belongs to the same economy, using a grain that was cheaper than wheat and a sweetener that was cheaper than sugar. Nut bread is the outlier: hickory nuts were gathered rather than bought over much of the eastern United States, and a nut loaf was a small domestic luxury. The reliance on the compressed yeast cake dates the collection precisely — commercial cake yeast had by then largely displaced homemade barm in town kitchens, though the "cupful yeast" of the rye and Indian recipe shows the older practice still in print.