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Nut Bread
1 1/2 cups milk 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup sugar 4 cups flour 1 cup chopped walnut meats 6 teaspoons baking powder Put the sugar in a large bowl. Sift the flour, salt and baking powder together, and add alternately with the milk to the sugar. Lastly, fold in the chopped walnut meats, and turn into two buttered tins. Bake in a moderate oven forty minutes.
A lean, eggless, butterless quick bread that relies entirely on baking powder for lift. It comes together in minutes, but the batter is stiffer than most modern loaf batters and the crumb is dense and slightly chewy rather than cakey.
- Oven temperatureA moderate oven is 350F. Forty minutes suits two small loaves; test with a skewer, and expect closer to 50-55 minutes if you divide the batter into one standard 9x5 pan instead.
- Two buttered tinsThe recipe gives no size, but two small bread tins of roughly 1-lb capacity (about 7 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches) suit this quantity of batter. Modern equivalents are two small loaf pans; parchment slings make the eggless loaves easier to lift out.
- Mixing methodAdding dry and liquid alternately to the sugar helps keep the batter smooth. Stop as soon as the flour disappears -- with 4 cups of flour and no fat or egg to tenderize it, overworking produces a tough, tunnelled loaf.
- The batter will look dryOne and a half cups of milk against 4 cups of flour gives a very thick, almost spoonable batter. A few extra tablespoons of milk, to a batter that just falls heavily from the spoon, may be closer to the intended texture.
- Baking powderSix teaspoons is 1 1/2 per cup of flour, which is high but not unreasonable for a loaf with no eggs. Use fresh double-acting powder and get the loaves into the oven promptly; the first rise begins as soon as the milk goes in.
- Walnut meats"Meats" means simply the shelled kernels. Toasting them for eight minutes at 350F before chopping deepens the flavor considerably, which this otherwise plain loaf needs.
- Yield and servingTwo small loaves, perhaps ten thin slices each. It slices badly warm and much better the next day; loaves of this kind were commonly served as buttered slices with tea, or used for sandwiches with cream cheese.
Nut breads like this one belong to the great age of chemically leavened "quick breads," which spread through American home baking after reliable commercial baking powder became a pantry staple in the later nineteenth century. A cook could produce a loaf in under an hour without yeast, a sponge, or an overnight wait. Nuts had their own appeal in this period: as vegetarian eating and wartime meat conservation converged, walnuts and other nuts were promoted as a protein substitute for meat, and nut loaves, nut roasts and nut butters appear throughout the cookery collections of the day. The absence of eggs and butter here is also characteristic of the frugal end of the genre -- milk, flour, sugar and nuts were enough, and the sweetened loaf did double duty as tea bread and as sandwich bread.