Box Bread
One quart of flour, one teacup of yeast, one teacup of melted lard or butter, four eggs, one teaspoonful of salt. Let it rise as light bread, and, when risen, make it into square rolls, without working it a second time. Let it rise again and then bake it.--Mrs. R. E. W.
A rich egg-and-fat roll dough from a book that assumes you keep a jar of liquid yeast on the shelf. Two things need translating before it will work: the yeast, and the fact that there is almost no liquid in the recipe apart from the eggs.
- The hinge: do not knock it back"Without working it a second time" is the whole instruction. After the first rise you cut and shape gently, keeping as much gas in the dough as you can, then let the shaped rolls prove again. Punching down and kneading a second time gives a tighter, breadier crumb than intended.
- The yeastA teacup of yeast means a cup of homemade liquid yeast — a thin, active batter of flour, water and often potato or hops, which supplied both leavening and a good deal of the dough's moisture. About 2 teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast gives comparable lift, but you must then add roughly 3/4 cup of warm water or milk to replace the liquid the old yeast contributed.
- Teacup and quartA teacup in nineteenth-century American receipts is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though some households used it as a full cup; the difference matters most for the fat. A quart of flour is about 4 cups, or roughly a pound. Even at the lower reading, 3/4 cup of melted lard to a pound of flour is a very rich dough, closer to brioche than to table bread.
- Rising times"Let it rise as light bread" meant several hours in a warm kitchen, since wild-yeast starters worked slowly. With modern yeast expect 1 1/2 to 2 hours for the first rise in a warm room, and 45 minutes to an hour for the shaped rolls. Enriched dough is sluggish; judge by volume, not the clock.
- "Light bread"In Southern usage light bread is ordinary yeast-risen wheat bread, as opposed to the biscuits, batter breads and corn breads that made up most daily baking. The phrase is a cross-reference to a technique the original reader knew by heart.
- OvenNo temperature is given because there was no dial. For small rich rolls, 375–400°F for 15 to 20 minutes, until well browned; the egg and fat colour the crust quickly, so watch the bottoms.
- Shaping and yieldCut the risen dough into squares with a floured knife or bench scraper and set them close together in a greased pan so they rise into one another. A quart of flour makes roughly 16 to 18 rolls of dinner size.
- FatLard gives the tenderness and faint savour the recipe was written for; butter gives more flavour and a softer crust. Either should be melted and cooled to lukewarm before it meets the yeast.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, gathered receipts from some 250 contributors, credited variously — some by full name, others, like this one, by initials only, the anonymity of the respectable Virginia housewife. The name "box bread" is not explained in the book and is often said to refer to the shaping: squared-off rolls set touching in a pan, so that they bake into a block and pull apart, rather than being rounded free-form — though this reading is a plausible guess rather than a settled one. Recipes of this kind, heavy with eggs and lard and depending on a live household yeast kept going from week to week, belonged to a kitchen where bread-making was continuous rather than occasional; commercial compressed yeast was only beginning to reach American cooks when this book appeared, and the book's yeast receipts still assume you make your own.