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Nut Bread (C graham flour Mrs A W Waldo t)
2 C graham flour Mrs. A. W. Waldo. ½ t soda 4 t baking powder 2 C sweet milk 1/2 C sugar 2 T molasses 1 t Mapleine 1 C nut meats Mrs. H. T. Mason.
Let stand one-half hour; bake 40 minutes.
Mrs. C. E. Grummitt omits the molasses and uses brown sugar.
A church-supper quick bread of the graham-and-molasses type, printed with the collision of two contributors' names and no oven temperature. A few things need settling before you mix.
- The batter is unusually slackTwo cups of flour to two cups of milk gives something closer to a thin pancake batter than a loaf batter. A lost line of type and a further measure of flour is one possible explanation, but that is only a guess. If you make it as printed, expect a dense, wet, pudding-like crumb.
- No oven temperature is givenFor a sweet quick bread in a loaf pan, 350F for the stated 40 minutes is the standard reading. Test with a skewer in the centre; graham loaves often need 45-50 minutes.
- MapleineA maple-flavoured extract sold by the Crescent Manufacturing Company of Seattle and heavily advertised in the 1910s and 20s. Any maple flavouring works; a teaspoon of real maple syrup is not a substitute, as it carries far less flavour per spoonful.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ. Modern whole-wheat flour is the nearest thing, though it is usually ground finer. Buy it fresh and keep it cold, since the germ goes rancid.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the buttermilk or sour milk that many recipes of the period called for. Whole milk is right here.
- Soda and baking powder togetherThe half teaspoon of soda is there for the molasses, which is acidic; the four teaspoons of baking powder do the lifting. If you follow Mrs. Grummitt and swap brown sugar for the molasses, the soda has little to work on and can leave a soapy note.
- SaltNone is listed, which was common when cooks salted by habit. Half a teaspoon improves the loaf considerably.
- The half-hour restStanding lets the bran in the graham flour absorb liquid, which helps keep the crumb from being gritty. Some leavening power will be lost in that time.
- Nuts and yieldA cup of nut meats means shelled; walnuts or hickory nuts suit it. Chop them coarsely. One standard loaf pan, about twelve slices.
Nut breads like this one belong to the great age of chemically leavened loaves, when baking powder made it possible to put a sweet, sliceable bread on the table without touching yeast. Graham flour carries the name of Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer who preached coarse unsifted wheat, and by the early twentieth century it had shed most of the moral crusade and become simply a pantry staple with a nutty flavour. The Mapleine is the period marker: a synthetic maple flavouring promoted hard to home bakers in the 1910s and 20s as a cheap stand-in for a syrup that cost real money. Notice too how the page works as a record of a congregation rather than a single author, with three women's names attached to one formula and Mrs. Grummitt's brown-sugar variation preserved alongside the original -- the muddle that jams Mrs. Waldo's name into the ingredient list may be a typesetting fault of the sort found in locally printed fundraising cookbooks, though it could equally be a transcription artifact.