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Peanut Butter Bread
2 cups flour 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup sugar 2/3 cup peanut butter 1 cup milk Sift flour, baking powder, salt and sugar together. Add milk to peanut butter, blend well and add to dry ingredients; beat thoroughly. Bake in greased loaf pan in slow oven 45 to 50 minutes. This is best when a day old. It makes delicious sandwiches cut in thin slices and filled with either cream cheese or lettuce and mayonnaise.
A promotional quick bread from a baking-powder company, and it behaves like one: no eggs, no fat beyond what the peanut butter carries, and a batter stiff enough to need spreading rather than pouring. A few adjustments bring it in line with modern pantries.
- Oven temperatureA "slow oven" is generally taken as 300-325F. Use 325F for the stated 45 to 50 minutes; a skewer should come out with a few moist crumbs.
- Pan sizeThe recipe specifies only a greased loaf pan. Loaf tins of the period were often smaller than modern ones, around 8 by 4 inches; in a 9 by 5 pan the loaf will be shallower and may be done sooner, so start checking early.
- The peanut butter has changedPeanut butter of this period was commonly little more than ground peanuts and salt, unsweetened and often unstabilised, though products varied. Most modern commercial peanut butter contains a little added sugar and stabilising fat; natural stir-style peanut butter is closest to the original.
- Blending order mattersAdding the milk to the peanut butter first is not decorative. Peanut butter will not disperse into a dry flour mixture; thin it with the milk a little at a time until it is a smooth pourable cream, then combine. Dumped in whole it leaves greasy pockets.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons to two cups of flour is on the generous side by current practice but not out of range, and the heavy peanut butter needs the lift. Use fresh double-acting powder; if the tin has been open a year the loaf will be dense.
- "Best when a day old"Accurate advice, not a nicety. Warm from the oven the crumb is crumbly and oily-tasting; wrapped and left overnight it firms up enough to slice thin without tearing, which is what the sandwich suggestion depends on.
- YieldOne small loaf, about 12 to 14 slices. It keeps three or four days wrapped, and it toasts well after that.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, and its recipes name the tin in the ingredient list — hence "4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder" rather than simply "baking powder." Peanut butter bread belongs to a burst of American enthusiasm for the ingredient in the first decades of the twentieth century, when commercial grinding made peanut butter cheap and it was promoted as an inexpensive protein, particularly during and after the First World War. Quick breads made with baking powder rather than yeast suited the same moment: no proofing, no skill in handling dough, and a loaf that needed only mixing and a spell in the oven. The serving note — thin slices with cream cheese, or lettuce and mayonnaise — suggests the era of the ladies' luncheon sandwich, where a sweetish bread paired with a savoury filling may well have been considered a refinement rather than an oddity.