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Baking-Powder Bread
1 quart flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon sugar 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder 1/2 boiled potato Milk or water (about 1 pint) Sift the dry ingredients thoroughly; rub in the boiled potato; add liquid to make a stiff batter or soft dough. Turn into a greased bread pan; smooth the top with a knife dipped in melted butter and bake in a moderate oven for about an hour. When done moisten the crust slightly with cold water and wrap in a clean cloth until cold.
A quick loaf leavened entirely with baking powder, softened with mashed potato. It behaves more like a large soda bread than a yeast loaf, so speed from mixing bowl to oven matters.
- Mix and bake immediatelyBaking powder begins releasing gas the moment the liquid goes in, and even double-acting powder loses lift if the dough stands. Have the pan greased and the oven at temperature before you add the milk.
- A quart of flourDry flour was measured by volume in this period: a quart is 4 cups, roughly 1 lb of all-purpose flour. The pint of liquid is a starting point only, since the potato contributes moisture of its own.
- Raising to modern proportionsTwo heaping teaspoons is about a tablespoon, which is on the low side for 4 cups of flour by current standards of roughly 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons per cup. Early twentieth-century powders varied widely in strength; if your loaf comes out dense, increase to 4 teaspoons next time.
- The potatoHalf a boiled potato is perhaps 2 to 3 oz, mashed or riced smooth and rubbed through the flour with the fingertips. Potato starch holds water and helps keep the crumb moist; leftover plain boiled potato is ideal, but not one that has been buttered or salted heavily.
- Moderate ovenRead this as roughly 350 to 375F. Baked in a loaf pan of about 9 by 5 inches, a quart-of-flour loaf will take 50 to 60 minutes, which matches the recipe's 'about an hour'; a skewer in the centre should come out clean and the internal temperature should read about 200F.
- Stiff batter or soft doughAim for a dough that just holds its shape on the spoon and can be smoothed flat rather than kneaded. Overworking it develops gluten and gives a tough, tunnelled crumb.
- The water-and-cloth finishBrushing the hot crust with cold water and wrapping the loaf softens what would otherwise be a hard, dry exterior, since there is no steam-injected oven or long yeast fermentation to help. Let it cool fully in the cloth before slicing, or the crumb will smear.
- YieldOne loaf, about 1 3/4 lb. It is best the day it is baked and is good toasted after that.
Chemically raised bread was a nineteenth-century development that reached ordinary kitchens once commercial baking powders became cheap and reliable in the second half of the century, and cookbooks of this era printed such loaves as a stand-in for yeast bread when there was no time to set a sponge or no reliable barm in the house. The potato is the older trick surviving into the newer method: potato water and mashed potato had long been used to feed yeast and to soften bread crumb, and here it does the softening job alone.