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Nut Bread (C Walnut meats t baking powder)
1 egg, well beaten. 1/2 C sugar. 1 C milk. 1. C Walnut meats 3½ t baking powder 2½ C flour Let rise 20 minutes. Bake 1 hour in slow oven. This makes one loaf of bread. 2 C white flour
This entry has come down to us badly garbled — the ingredient column has collapsed into the instructions and at least one liquid is missing entirely. Read it as a fragment of a standard baking-powder nut loaf rather than a working formula.
- What is missingAs printed there is no liquid, no sugar, no salt and no egg, so the listed ingredients cannot form a batter. A loaf of this kind would have needed some liquid (milk or water), sugar and salt, and probably an egg, but the amounts are not recoverable from this page.
- The contradictory flourThe text gives both 2½ cups flour and 2 cups white flour. One of these is likely a second flour — whole wheat or graham was common in nut loaves — but which is which cannot be recovered from the page.
- Baking powder quantity3½ teaspoons to 2½ cups of flour works out at about 1.4 teaspoons per cup, a little above the modern norm of roughly 1 to 1¼; if both flour entries are genuine the ratio is lower still. Older baking powders were less uniform than today's, and period recipes often call for more than now seems necessary.
- Slow ovenA slow oven is around 300 to 325F. An hour at that temperature suits a single dense loaf; test with a skewer at the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- "Let rise 20 minutes"There is no yeast here, so nothing rises in the usual sense. The rest lets the batter hydrate and the leavening begin working, which softens the crumb — but a long wait spends the chemical lift before the loaf reaches heat, so keep it brief.
- Walnut meats"Meats" simply means shelled kernels. A cup is about 4 ounces; toast them briefly and chop coarse, since untoasted walnuts in a sweet loaf taste flat.
- YieldOne loaf, as stated — about twelve slices. If you want to bake a nut bread today, work from a complete modern quick-bread recipe and treat this page as a historical record.
Nut breads belong to the great wave of chemically leavened "quick breads" that swept American home baking after commercial baking powder became cheap and reliable in the later nineteenth century. A cook who had once needed yeast, a warm corner and half a day could now produce a sweet loaf in a fraction of the time, and walnut, date and raisin loaves multiplied accordingly in the community cookbooks of the period. Such books were often assembled from recipes contributed by many hands, and it is easy enough for a recipe like this one to lose its milk and its sugar somewhere between the contributor's kitchen and the printed page. The result is a useful reminder that these volumes were written for women who already knew what a nut loaf was, and needed only the proportions their neighbour happened to favour.