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Brown Bread (Mix dry ingredients together)
2 C white flour 2 C graham flour 2 C bran flour Mix dry ingredients together. Add 1 egg, beaten 1/2 C molasses 1/2 C Karo corn syrup 2 t soda, dissolved in Mrs. P. G. Osborn. 1/2 C sugar 1 t salt 1/2 C boiling water 1 pt. sweet milk 2 C raisins 1 C nuts Alma Timmerman.
Bake one hour. This makes two loaves. 1 egg
The page has been set from a church-supper manuscript and two contributors' names have fallen into the middle of the ingredient list, so the text reads out of order. It is a molasses quick bread of the standard type, but one crucial figure is missing.
- The flour is not givenThe recipe opens with "mix dry ingredients together" and never says what they are or how much. A batter with 1 pt milk, 1/2 C molasses, 1/2 C corn syrup, 1/2 C sugar and 1 egg would need several cups of flour, possibly part graham or whole wheat, to make two loaves. That is an inference, not what the book says, so treat the quantity as unknown and work from a current brown bread recipe if you want a reliable result.
- Reading the order of workThe intended sequence is: dry ingredients together; beat in the egg, molasses, Karo, sugar and milk; dissolve the 2 t soda in the 1/2 C boiling water and add last; stir in raisins and nuts. The names Mrs. P. G. Osborn and Alma Timmerman are contributor credits, not instructions.
- Soda in boiling waterDissolving the soda separately and adding it at the end was a common way of handling molasses batters. It disperses the soda evenly and starts the reaction with the acid in the molasses, so the loaves go into the pans and the oven promptly rather than sitting on the counter.
- Sweet milkThis means fresh whole milk, as opposed to the soured milk or buttermilk called for elsewhere in books of this period. Whole milk is the direct substitute; do not swap in buttermilk, since the soda here is already matched to the molasses.
- KaroA branded commercial corn syrup, used here alongside molasses. The recipe does not say whether light or dark; light corn syrup today is the nearest equivalent, and golden syrup gives a similar body with more flavour.
- No oven temperatureFor an hour's bake on a loaf of this size, use a moderate oven, 350F. Molasses and syrup brown fast, so tent the tops with foil if they colour before the centres set.
- Pans and donenessTwo standard 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch loaf pans, greased, filled about two-thirds. A skewer in the centre should come out clean; these loaves are dense and a gummy streak is easy to miss.
- KeepingWrapped and left a day, the crumb firms and slices cleanly. Fresh from the oven it crumbles.
Brown bread in American cookery covers two related things: the steamed, canned-shape Boston loaf of rye and cornmeal, and the baked molasses quick bread that congregational cookbooks like this one print by the dozen. This is the baked kind, and its ingredient list gives it an earliest possible date: molasses cut with Karo, the corn syrup that Corn Products began selling under that name in the first decade of the twentieth century, at a moment when packaged syrup and baking soda in tins were rewriting the home baker's shortcuts. Two names attached to one recipe is characteristic of these compiled fundraising books, and the muddle in the typesetting is plain enough on the page, though why the credits doubled and the flour went missing the book does not say.