Lunch Bread
1 pint of flour. 1 tablespoonful of butter. 3 tablespoonful of sugar. 1 teaspoonful of soda. 2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar. 2 eggs. 1 cup of milk and a little salt.
Bake in a flat pan in a quick oven. To be eaten hot with butter.--Mrs. I. H.
A plain quick bread built on the old soda-and-cream-of-tartar leavening, meant to be cut in squares and served warm. The measurements are volumetric and a little loose, but the proportions work.
- A pint of flourFlour was measured by volume in liquid pints: 2 cups, which is roughly 8 oz sifted or 9 to 10 oz unsifted all-purpose. Everything else scales around that.
- The leaveningOne teaspoon of soda with two of cream of tartar is a homemade baking powder, mixed fresh in the bowl at a time when packaged powders were available but varied in quality and cost. It is equivalent to about 4 teaspoons of modern double-acting baking powder, which is generous for 2 cups of flour; 3 teaspoons gives a cleaner flavor with less metallic aftertaste.
- Work fastCream of tartar and soda react on contact with the milk, and there is no second lift in the oven as there would be with double-acting powder. Have the pan greased and the oven hot before the wet and dry meet, and get it baking immediately.
- A quick ovenAbout 400 to 425F. At that heat a flat pan of this batter takes roughly 20 to 25 minutes.
- A flat panA shallow rectangular pan, 8x8 or 9x9 inches, or a jelly-roll pan for a thinner, crisper bread. The batter should sit about an inch deep; spread thinner and it will be closer to a biscuit sheet.
- Butter and sugarOne tablespoon of butter is little enough that it can simply be melted and stirred into the milk and eggs rather than creamed. Three tablespoons of sugar makes it faintly sweet, not a cake.
- YieldAn 8-inch pan cuts into nine squares and serves six at a lunch table. It is at its best within half an hour of coming out; soda breads of this kind go dry and flat-tasting by the next day.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, advertised on its title page contributions from some 250 of Virginia's noted housewives, with some from neighbouring states as well; attributions vary, and this one appears simply as "Mrs. I. H." The recipe belongs to the long transitional moment in American baking when cooks made their own baking powder in the bowl, measuring soda against cream of tartar, because packaged powders were both expensive and of uneven quality. "Lunch bread" is simply what the name says: something quick enough to be mixed and baked while the midday meal was assembled, standing in for the yeast-raised loaf that would have been started hours before. Its close relatives in this and other Southern books are often said to run under names like tea bread, luncheon rolls and soda biscuit, all of them fast, all of them eaten hot with butter, and all of them perhaps assuming a wood range that could be brought to a fierce heat on short notice.