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Raisin Bread
1 cake compressed yeast 1 cup lukewarm water 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled 6 cups sifted flour 3/4 cup sugar 3/4 cup raisins 4 level tablespoons lard 1 teaspoon salt Dissolve the yeast and one tablespoon of sugar in lukewarm liquid; add two cups of flour, the lard (or butter) and sugar, well creamed; and beat until smooth. Cover and set aside to rise in a warm place, free from draft, until light-about one and one half hours. Add raisins well-floured, the rest of the flour to make a soft dough, and last the salt. Knead lightly; place in well-greased bowl; cover and let rise again until double in bulk-about one and one half hours. Mold into loaves; fill well-greased pans half full, cover and let rise until light-about one hour. Glaze with egg diluted with water, and bake forty-five minutes.
A straightforward sponge-and-dough sweet loaf from the era when yeast came in a foil-wrapped cake. Two things need supplying: a substitute for the yeast and an oven temperature, which the original omits entirely.
- The yeast cakeOne cake of compressed (fresh) yeast is about 0.6 oz. Substitute one packet of active dry or instant yeast, roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons. Fresh yeast is still sold in some markets; the dry equivalent works here, though it may be slower off the mark.
- Oven temperatureNone is given, as was normal in books written for coal and early gas ranges. A sweet enriched loaf of this size bakes at 375F for the stated forty-five minutes; the egg glaze will colour well before the crumb is set, so tent with foil if it darkens early. The loaves are done at an internal 190F.
- Liquid quantitiesOne cup water plus one cup milk against six cups of flour. The recipe itself says to add 'the rest of the flour to make a soft dough,' so hold back the last half cup and add it only if the dough is genuinely slack; period flour may also have been softer and was measured more loosely.
- Salt goes in lastThis is deliberate, not an oversight. Salt slows yeast, so the sponge is built without it. Make sure it is worked in thoroughly during the kneading or you will get streaks of flat, bland crumb.
- Flouring the raisinsTossing raisins in flour before adding them keeps them from sinking and from sticking in a mass. It still works.
- LardFour level tablespoons of lard gives a tender, slightly savoury crumb. Butter, which the recipe permits, is the usual choice now; either should be soft enough to cream with the sugar.
- Pans and yieldThis makes two standard loaves. 'Fill well-greased pans half full' is the useful instruction: the dough should roughly double in the pan during the final hour, coming up to about the rim.
- Total timeThree risings at about an hour and a half, an hour and a half, and an hour puts this at roughly five hours start to finish. The second rise can be done overnight in the refrigerator if that suits better.
Raisin bread of this kind belongs to the era of commercial compressed yeast, when a single foil-wrapped cake bought at the grocer replaced the homemade barm and salt-rising starters of the nineteenth century. The manufacturers promoted the cakes hard, and household baking of the period is often said to have leaned toward quick, reliable, timed loaves aimed at a cook with no baker's instinct and a clock on the wall: about one and one half hours attached to each stage. The sponge method used here, beating a soft batter of yeast, liquid and part of the flour and letting it go light before the rest is worked in, is older than the packaged yeast and survived because it gives enriched doughs a head start against the sugar and fat that slow them.