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Nut or Raisin Bread
2 1/2 cups flour 1/2 cup graham flour 1/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 cup walnuts 1 egg 1 1/2 cups milk Sift dry ingredients together. Add nuts chopped not too fine; add beaten egg to milk and add to dry ingredients to make a soft dough. Put into greased loaf pan. Allow to stand 20 minutes. Bake in moderate oven from 45 to 60 minutes. One cup raisins may be used in place of nuts.
A plain quick bread of the baking-powder era, and it behaves like one: a wet batter-dough, a short rest, a long moderate bake.
- Oven temperature"Moderate" in this period is conventionally read as somewhere around 350-375F; the recipe itself gives no figure. Allow the 45 to 60 minutes the recipe calls for and test with a skewer in the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarse whole-wheat flour milled with the bran and germ left in. Whole-wheat flour is the closest supermarket equivalent; it absorbs slightly more liquid, so the dough will look wetter at first and firm up during the rest.
- The 20-minute restThe original gives no reason for it; the likeliest effect is that the bran and flour take up liquid, so the batter firms slightly as it stands. Get it into the oven promptly once the time is up.
- MixingCombine only until no dry flour remains. Baking-powder breads toughen with beating, and the crumb should be tender and slightly crumbly rather than chewy.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons for three cups of flour works out at about 1 1/3 teaspoons per cup, at the upper end of ordinary modern practice rather than outside it. Use a double-acting powder and level the spoons; heaped measures can leave a metallic edge.
- Nuts and raisins"Chopped not too fine" means roughly halved or quartered walnut pieces, so they stay identifiable in the slice. Toasting them first is not in the original but improves the flavour considerably. Raisins, if substituted, can be tossed with a spoonful of the measured flour to keep them from sinking.
- Yield and servingOne loaf, roughly twelve to fourteen slices. Like most quick breads it slices badly warm; cool completely, then serve plain or with butter. It toasts well once a day or two old.
Nut bread of this kind belongs to the American quick-bread boom that followed the spread of reliable chemical leavening in the second half of the nineteenth century. Once baking powder was cheap and consistent, a household could put a sweetened loaf on the table with no yeast, no sponge and no overnight wait, and "nut bread" became a fixture of tea tables, church suppers and lunchboxes. The recipe appears here because the book is a promotional cookbook issued by the Royal Baking Powder Company, which named its product in the ingredient list as a matter of course. The graham flour is a nod to the mid-century reform interest in unrefined wheat associated with Sylvester Graham, by this date long detached from his moralising and simply regarded as a wholesome, nutty-tasting flour.