Bread: Turn
Put on a cover and set in a warm place to raise. When it doubles its bulk, add more flour if necessary and work with a wooden spoon until it can be handled. Turn out on a floured baking board and knead thoroughly. Mold into loaves, put into greased bread pans, and set it to rise in a warm place. When light bake in a moderate oven for three quarters of an hour.
Squash Bread (German recipe). 2 cupfuls squash, + cupful sugar, 3 cupfuls scalded milk, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 yeast cake, Flour enough to knead.
Press the stewed squash through a potato ricer, stir it with the sugar, salt, and butter into the hot milk; when cool, pour in the dissolved yeast and as much flour as will make a dough that can be handled. Turn out on a baking board and knead for fifteen minutes. Return to the bread raiser and let it double its bulk.
The page runs two recipes together: the opening paragraph is the tail end of a plain white bread, and the squash bread that follows sends you back to it for the rising and baking. Read the squash recipe first, then return to the top for the second rise and the oven.
- The hinge: cool the milk before the yeastScalded milk at 180F will kill yeast outright. The instruction "when cool" means below about 110F, and with two cups of hot squash stirred in the mixture holds heat for a long while. Test it against your wrist before adding the yeast.
- The sugar quantity is corruptedThe original reads "+ cupful sugar" where the printed fraction has dropped out. Either a quarter or a half cup would suit this volume of dough; half a cup gives a lightly sweet loaf.
- SaltSalt appears in the method but never in the ingredient list. For a dough built on three cups of milk and two cups of squash, two to three teaspoons is the working range.
- One yeast cakeA commercial yeast cake of the era was compressed fresh yeast; sizes varied, with the small cake commonly around 0.6 ounce. Substitute one packet, about 2 1/4 teaspoons, of active dry yeast, softened in a few tablespoons of warm water.
- SquashThis means winter squash — Hubbard, buttercup, butternut — stewed until soft and pressed through a ricer, not summer squash. Two cupfuls is the cooked, riced volume, and drain it well or the flour requirement climbs sharply. Canned pumpkin purée behaves the same way.
- "Flour enough to knead"With three cupfuls of milk and two of wet purée, expect a great deal of flour -- likely nine cups or more, depending on how wet the squash is. Add it in stages; the dough should stay slightly tacky rather than stiff, since squash breads firm up as they prove.
- Bread raiserA covered tin or earthenware pail kept near the stove. Any large bowl with a cloth or lid in a spot around 75-80F does the same job. First rise until doubled, roughly 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
- Oven and timeA moderate oven is usually taken as 350-375F. Forty-five minutes, as the recipe says, suits a standard loaf pan; the sugar and squash brown the crust early, so tent with foil if it colours before the centre reaches 190-200F.
- YieldThe quantities given make roughly three to four standard 9x5 loaves. The squash keeps them moist for several days.
Vegetable breads were a standing feature of nineteenth-century American baking: potato, pumpkin and squash all went into the dough to add moisture and keep a loaf soft for days in a house with no refrigeration. The "German recipe" label reflects how such collections credited dishes to immigrant kitchens, though squash itself is a New World crop. The recipe as printed is loose in the usual ways: the salt goes missing from the ingredient list, the preceding recipe's instructions are borrowed for the rising and baking, and the cook is assumed to know what a bread raiser is and how a risen dough should feel.