Gluten Bread
1 egg yeast cake 1/4 cup warm water 3 cups gluten Mix water, milk, salt and butter. When lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake, egg well beaten, and gluten. Let rise, when spongy beat well, add enough more gluten to shape. Knead, let rise, shape in loaves, let rise, and bake one hour.
The ingredient line has been mangled in printing — milk, salt and butter appear in the method but never in the list, and the yeast and water quantities have lost their numbers. Treat this as a skeleton to be read alongside a standard white loaf rather than a complete formula.
- The missing quantitiesAs printed, only "1 egg", a yeast cake, a cup of warm water and 3 cups of gluten survive with any figures, and even the water and yeast amounts are partly lost. A period loaf of this size would take roughly a cup of milk, a teaspoon of salt and a tablespoon of butter; nothing in the text confirms it.
- "Gluten" is not vital wheat glutenAround 1907 gluten flour meant a commercial high-protein wheat flour sold for diabetics, with much of the starch washed out; protein content varied a great deal from brand to brand but was far below that of modern vital wheat gluten, which runs about 75-80 percent. Three cups of vital wheat gluten would give you a rubber ball, not a dough. Use a high-gluten bread flour, or bread flour with a few tablespoons of vital wheat gluten added.
- One yeast cakeA compressed yeast cake of the period was about 0.6 oz, equivalent to roughly 2¼ teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Dissolve it in water no hotter than 110F; the recipe's "lukewarm" is the operative instruction, since a hot milk mixture would kill the yeast.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given, as was usual in books of this date. For a modern oven, 375F suits bread of this type. An hour is long for a single loaf at that heat — check at 40 minutes and pull it at an internal 195-200F.
- Handling a high-gluten doughThe sponge stage ("let rise, when spongy beat well") does part of the gluten development for you. Once you add the second flour, knead only until smooth; over-worked high-protein dough tightens and fights the shaping, and the crumb comes out dense and chewy.
- Expect a tight loafWith the starch reduced, the bread rises less and stays close-grained and slightly leathery. That texture came with the dietary purpose; it was never going to eat like a soft sandwich loaf.
- YieldProbably one standard 8½ x 4½ inch loaf, or two small ones, though the recipe's open-ended second addition of gluten makes the total flour uncertain.
Gluten bread belongs to the era before insulin, when treatment for diabetes centered on severe restriction of starch, alongside fasting and other restrictive regimens. From the 1880s onward, mills and pharmacies in Europe and America sold "gluten flour" — wheat flour with much of its starch washed away. The flours were notoriously variable in quality, and physicians of the period complained that some commercial gluten flours contained nearly as much starch as ordinary bread flour. Lowney's book, published by the Massachusetts chocolate firm and compiled by Maria Willett Howard, was a general-purpose household manual, and the inclusion of this loaf shows how routine such diabetic baking had become in a middle-class kitchen by 1907. Insulin's introduction in the early 1920s made the strict starch-free regimen obsolete, and recipes like this one gradually dropped out of the general cookbooks.