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Nut Bread (Mrs A M Lovell C flour C sugar)
Mrs. A. M. Lovell. 3 C flour 1 C sugar 1 C milk ¾ C walnut meats 4 level t baking powder 1 t salt 1 egg Sift sugar, flour, baking powder together, add milk and beaten egg. Let stand 20 minutes and bake.
Mrs. Emma G. Smith Note:-Mrs. Charles Laycock uses 1 cup chopped nuts and 3t baking powder with the above recipe.
Mrs. Geo. Smith uses brown sugar and only 2 C flour. 1 egg, well beaten Salt 1 C milk
A plain quick bread of the church-supper type, written in the shorthand of a cook who assumed the reader already knew how loaf bread behaved. Two things are missing from the text and one is garbled by the scanner.
- The nuts"34 C walnut meats" is 3/4 cup, an artifact of the fraction bar dropping out in transcription. Chop them coarsely and fold them in last, after the milk and egg — the instructions never say to add them, but they belong in the batter, tossed with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- C, t and TC is cup, t is level teaspoon, T would be tablespoon. Four level teaspoons of baking powder in three cups of flour is high by modern standards; the variation attributed to Mrs. Laycock, three teaspoons with a full cup of nuts, is closer to what a current recipe would call for.
- "Bake" means a moderate oven"Bake" -- no temperature is given at all. For a sweet quick bread loaf, 350F on the middle rack is the modern equivalent.
- Pan and timeThe recipe names no pan. The quantities suit a single standard loaf tin of about 9 by 5 inches, greased. Expect an hour or a little more at 350F; a skewer in the centre should come out clean and the crack down the top should look dry rather than wet.
- The 20-minute restThe recipe calls for it without explanation; standing lets the flour hydrate. Do not extend it much beyond 20 minutes or the leavening is spent before the loaf reaches the oven.
- Baking powder then and nowEarly twentieth-century baking powders varied in strength and many were single-acting, releasing most of their gas on contact with liquid. Modern double-acting powder gives a second lift in the oven, which is another reason the four teaspoons can be reduced.
- The variationsMrs. Geo. Smith's version — brown sugar and only two cups of flour — makes a distinctly wetter, darker, more cake-like loaf. Treat it as a separate recipe rather than a tweak.
- Yield and keepingOne loaf, about twelve slices. Like most quick breads it slices cleanly only once fully cooled, and it is better on the second day, wrapped.
Nut bread belongs to the great wave of chemically leavened "quick breads" that spread through American home baking after reliable commercial baking powder became a pantry staple in the later nineteenth century: no yeast, no proofing, no skill in kneading. Community cookbooks are where the form is best documented, because the same basic formula was often contributed by several women at once, each with her own adjustment -- which is exactly what happened here, with the compiler dutifully printing Mrs. Laycock's and Mrs. Geo. Smith's amendments beneath Mrs. Lovell's original. Walnuts, black where they grew wild and English once California orchards made them cheap, were a common choice. The recipe's terseness is itself period evidence: a contributor to a book of this kind expected her readers to know what pan to use and how hot to build the fire, and wasted no paper saying so.