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Coffee Bread
1/2 pint (1 cup) scalded milk 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) butter 4 ozs. (1/2 cup) sugar ½ teaspoonful salt I compressed yeast cake 1 gill (1/2 cup) warm milk 1 egg 1 cupful Sultana raisins Flour Scald the milk, add the butter, sugar, and salt to it; when lukewarm, add the yeast cake dissolved in the lukewarm milk, the egg well beaten, the raisins, and enough sifted flour to make a stiff batter.
Turn into a well-buttered casserole, cover, and allow to rise overnight. In the morning spread in another buttered fireproof dish, cover, and allow to rise again.
A sweet enriched yeast dough of the old sponge-overnight type. The chief difficulty is that the original stops before baking, and never states the quantity of flour.
- The missing flour"Enough sifted flour to make a stiff batter" is the only guide. With 1 1/2 cups of total liquid plus butter and egg, something in the region of 3 to 5 cups of all-purpose flour is likely; add it gradually and stop at a batter thick enough to hold a spoon upright, not a kneadable dough.
- The missing bakeThe text ends at the second rise, so no temperature or time is given. A dough of this richness is conventionally baked in a moderate oven, about 350F, until the loaf sounds hollow and reads roughly 190F inside — but that is standard practice, not this book's instruction.
- CasseroleIn a casserole book of this period this means an ovenproof earthenware or glass baking dish that goes from oven to table, not a modern layered bake. The first one is simply a rising bowl; the second is the baking vessel.
- A gillHalf a cup, as the recipe helpfully glosses. The total liquid is one cup scalded milk plus half a cup warm milk.
- Compressed yeast cakeA moist fresh cake, commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry yeast, dissolved in the warm milk exactly as directed.
- Temperature of the milk"Lukewarm" is the hinge. Freshly scalded milk is hot enough to kill the yeast; let it drop to about 105F before the yeast goes in, and check the butter-sugar mixture separately.
- Sultana raisinsGolden raisins. Toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour before adding, or they sink through a batter this loose.
- Overnight riseAn enriched egg-and-butter batter left out all night will overproof badly in a warm modern kitchen. A cool room, or the refrigerator with a longer morning warm-up, gives a better second rise.
- YieldNot stated in the original. A batter of this size would fill one large baking dish or two smaller round casseroles; servings can only be estimated.
Coffee bread is the English name for the sweetened, butter-rich yeast loaves that Scandinavian and German immigrant households baked for the morning table — kaffebröd, Kaffeebrot — bread eaten with coffee rather than bread made from it. The overnight sponge speaks to the rhythm of the household rather than to any shortcoming in the yeast: a rich dough was mixed at night, left to work slowly in a cool kitchen, and shaped and baked before breakfast. Its appearance in a casserole-dish book reflects a specific commercial moment, when fireproof earthenware and the new heat-resistant glass were being sold to American cooks as vessels that would carry a dish from oven to table, and publishers issued small volumes demonstrating that everything from soup to sweet bread could be made in them.