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Bread (Cup brown sugar cup lukewarm)
1/4 cup brown sugar 1/2 cup lukewarm water 4 cups sifted flour 1 teaspoon salt 2 cups boiling water 2 cups rolled oats 1 cake compressed yeast Pour two cups of boiling water over the oatmeal; cover and let stand until cool. Dissolve yeast and sugar in one half cup of lukewarm water and add this to the oatmeal and water. Add one cup of flour, or enough to make an ordinary sponge; beat well; cover and set aside in a moderately warm place to rise for one hour, or until light. Add enough flour to make a dough-about three cupsand the salt. Knead well; place in greased bowl; cover and let rise in a moderately warm place until double in bulk about one and one half hours. Mold into loaves; fill well-greased pans half full; cover and let rise again about one hour. Bake forty-five minutes in a hot oven.
A half cup of chopped nuts and one tablespoon of lard or butter may be added if desired.
A straightforward oatmeal yeast bread, though the ingredient list is garbled in the original printing and the section heading ("Frozen Desserts") is a filing error from the loose-leaf format. Read the method rather than the list.
- The oatmeal soak is the hingeTwo cups boiling water over the oats must cool to lukewarm before the yeast goes near it, or the yeast dies. Wait until it is comfortable to the finger, around 100F; the cooled porridge is thick and holds heat, so allow a good while -- the recipe simply says to cover it and let it stand until cool.
- Compressed yeastA cake of fresh yeast of the sort sold for household baking was in the region of 0.6 oz, though sizes varied by maker. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast dissolved in the half cup of lukewarm water with the brown sugar.
- "Rolled oats" in 1900"Rolled oats" here -- These were thick-cut, closer to today's old-fashioned rolled oats than to quick oats. Quick oats will work but give a softer, pastier crumb; steel-cut oats will not soften enough in the soak.
- A hot ovenIn modern terms roughly 400-450F. Forty-five minutes at that heat suits a full-sized loaf in a heavy pan; check at 35 minutes and pull the loaves at an internal temperature of 200-205F. If the crust darkens early, drop the heat.
- Flour totalsOne cup goes into the sponge and about three into the dough, four cups in all, so the sifted-flour figure in the list is the whole amount rather than an addition. Oatmeal doughs vary in wetness; expect to work in a little extra during kneading.
- Salt added lateThe salt goes in with the last of the flour rather than into the sponge, which suits the fact that salt slows yeast. Distribute it evenly as you add that flour or you will get patchy, bland spots.
- Pans and yieldThe dough is enough for about two standard loaf pans, filled half full as directed; the recipe itself names neither a yield nor a pan size. The second rise is given as about an hour in a moderately warm place.
- The optional fatOne tablespoon of lard or butter is worth adding; without any fat the bread stales quickly and slices dry by the second day.
Oatmeal bread of this kind belonged to an era when rolled oats had only recently become a cheap, shelf-stable pantry staple in North America thanks to industrial steam-rolling in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The two-stage method here, a loose sponge left to go "light" before the dough is stiffened, is the older bread technique that survived in household books long after commercial bakeries had moved on: it gave the baker a visible sign that a cake of perishable compressed yeast was still alive before committing four cups of flour to it.