Rye Bread
2 teaspoons salt yeast cake cup lukewarm water 3 cups rye Put butter, sugar and salt in mixing bowl; add scalded milk; when lukewarm, add dissolved yeast cake and white flour.
Let rise until of spongy consistency; add rye flour and knead. Let rise again, shape into loaves or rolls. Rise again and bake the same as Graham Bread. 2 cups boiling water 2 cups scalded milk 2 teaspoons butter 2 teaspoons salt
The ingredient list here has been scrambled in printing — quantities appear detached from their ingredients, and the amounts of sugar and white flour are missing entirely. Treat this as a method to follow rather than a formula to measure against.
- What is missingThe list gives salt, butter, a yeast cake, water, milk and 3 cups rye flour, but no quantity for the sugar or the white flour the method calls for. A workable reading is 2 cups scalded milk, 2 teaspoons butter and 2 teaspoons salt as printed, a spoonful or two of sugar, one yeast cake in a quarter cup of lukewarm water (the water quantity is also missing), about 3 cups white bread flour for the sponge and 3 cups rye after.
- The stray boiling water"2 cups boiling water" may belong to a neighbouring recipe on the original page; note that "2 teaspoons salt" also appears twice, which suggests two ingredient lists have run together. Adding it to 2 cups of scalded milk would give a batter, not a dough.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake of the period was a small cake of compressed fresh yeast, commonly somewhere between half an ounce and an ounce. Substitute one 2¼-teaspoon packet of active dry or instant yeast; with instant you can skip the dissolving step and mix it into the flour.
- Scalded milkScalding was routine with raw milk, and is usually explained as deactivating components in the milk that weaken gluten. Pasteurised milk needs no scalding, but it must still be warmed and then cooled to lukewarm, since hot milk will kill the yeast.
- Sponge first, rye secondThis is the hinge of the method. Rye flour has little gluten and its pentosans make dough sticky, so the wheat flour is fermented alone into a spongy batter to build structure before the rye goes in. Do not shortcut by mixing all the flour at once.
- Kneading ryeRye dough stays tackier than an all-wheat dough and may not feel fully smooth, though with this proportion of wheat it should still come together. Knead eight to ten minutes and resist the urge to flour it heavily, which produces a dry, crumbly loaf.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature of its own; it sends you to the Graham Bread page, where the baking instructions sit. Failing that, a moderate oven around 375F, 40 to 50 minutes for loaves and 20 to 25 for rolls. The loaf is done at an internal temperature of 200 to 205F and should sound hollow when tapped underneath.
- YieldWith the quantities suggested above, two 8x4-inch loaves, or about eighteen rolls. Rye is best sliced the day after baking, once the crumb has set.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston as a promotional volume for its chocolate and cocoa, but like most such books it carried a full general repertoire, bread chapters included. This rye is mostly wheat flour with a minority of rye, leavened with a purchased compressed yeast cake rather than the sour rye starter used in the German, Polish and Jewish baking traditions that had made rye bread familiar in northern American cities. It uses the sponge method — fermenting the white flour first, then working in the weaker flour — and refers the reader back to another page for the baking.