New Bread
1 quart of flour. 1 dessertspoonful of lard and the same of butter. 1 teaspoonful of soda.
Work the lard and butter in the flour, and sprinkle in the soda, with salt to taste. Mix with buttermilk or clabber to the consistency of biscuit. Roll it round to the size of a teaplate. Made just before eating.--Mrs. F.
A soda bread of the plainest kind, and one that assumes knowledge the modern reader does not have: the original never says to bake it, or how long, or how hot. Everything else is straightforward.
- The missing instructionNo baking direction is given because none was thought necessary; anything supplied here is reconstruction. A hot oven, in the region of 425-450F for 20-25 minutes, on a lightly greased sheet or in a heavy skillet, will brown it and leave it hollow-sounding underneath; a heavy covered skillet on the hearth or a griddle would have served equally well. Cut it in wedges at the table.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume, not weight. A quart is 4 cups, about 1 lb of soft Southern flour; a low-protein flour such as White Lily is closer to the original than bread flour.
- DessertspoonfulTwo teaspoons, halfway between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. So about 2 teaspoons lard and 2 teaspoons butter, worked in with the fingertips as for biscuit.
- Soda and acidOne teaspoon of soda to a quart of flour needs genuinely sour liquid to work against, or the bread will taste of soda. Cultured buttermilk from a carton is acidic enough; sweet milk is not.
- ClabberClabber is raw milk left to sour and thicken naturally, once a kitchen staple and now essentially unavailable. Use buttermilk, or thin plain whole-milk yogurt to pouring consistency.
- "Consistency of biscuit"A soft dough that just holds together, not a batter and not a kneaded bread dough. Handle it as little as possible; the rise comes from the soda alone and rough handling makes it tough.
- Size and yieldA Victorian tea plate runs about 6 to 7 inches across. A quart of flour is a good deal of dough for a single round of that size, so it may well have been divided into more than one; if all of it goes into one round it will be an inch or so thick, feeding four to six. The note 'made just before eating' is the point: soda bread of this kind is best straight from the oven and goes dull quickly.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialed Virginia housekeepers, which is why this one arrives credited only to "Mrs. F." Its brevity is characteristic of the genre: contributors wrote for women who had made biscuit dough hundreds of times and needed only the proportions, not the method. The bread itself belongs to the great family of quick breads that spread through American kitchens after chemically manufactured soda became cheap and widely sold in the mid-nineteenth century, taking their place alongside the older reliance on yeast, sourdough starters and hand-beaten air. In a dairying household clabber and buttermilk were byproducts always at hand, and pairing them with soda gave a leavened loaf quickly, which is precisely the value of the closing instruction to make it just before eating.