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Prune Bread
1 cup prunes 2 1/2 cups graham flour; or 1 cup flour and 1 1/2 cups graham flour 1/4 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 4 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 cup milk 1 tablespoon shortening Wash prunes, soak several hours, drain, stone and chop. Mix flour, sugar, salt and baking powder; add milk and beat well; add prunes and melted shortening. Put into greased bread pan; allow to stand 20 to 25 minutes in warm place. Bake in moderate oven one hour. Dates may be used instead of prunes.
A single-rise-free quick bread from a baking powder company's promotional booklet, built on graham flour and stewed-soft prunes. It works today with almost no changes, though a few of its instructions assume a leavening that no longer exists in the same form.
- Moderate ovenSet the oven to 350F. A full hour at that temperature suits a dense, fruited loaf; check at 50 minutes with a skewer in the centre.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, bran and germ included. Stone-ground whole wheat flour is the closest current equivalent; standard whole wheat flour works but gives a finer, tighter crumb.
- The standing timeThe 20 to 25 minute rest lets the bran hydrate. Modern double-acting baking powder gives a second lift in the oven, so the rest costs you little; there is no advantage in stretching it much past 25 minutes.
- Baking powder quantityFour teaspoons to two and a half cups of flour is heavy by current standards, which may reflect the weight of graham flour as much as anything, though it is worth remembering the book was published to sell the powder. Three teaspoons is ample and may leave less of a metallic aftertaste.
- PrunesToday's packaged pitted prunes are already soft and do not need the several hours' soak called for here. Twenty minutes in hot water is enough to plump them; drain well and pat dry, or the extra liquid slackens the batter. Chop them roughly and toss them in a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink.
- ShorteningOne tablespoon is all the fat in the loaf, which is why it stales quickly. Melted butter or a neutral oil both work; add it after the milk so it does not seize on contact with cold liquid.
- Pan and yieldThe recipe says only "bread pan"; a greased 8 by 4 inch loaf tin suits this quantity. The batter is thick enough to need spreading into the corners. One loaf, about ten slices; it cuts far better the day after baking.
The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of a long line of American branded cookbooks that gave away recipes in order to sell a tin, and its recipes are built around chemical leavening rather than yeast. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the early nineteenth-century preacher and dietary reformer who argued that unbolted wheat meal was morally and physically superior to fine white flour; by the time this book appeared the name had long outlived his movement and simply meant coarse whole wheat. Prunes belong here for practical reasons: dried, cheap, shelf-stable and sweet, they let a baker add fruit to a loaf in any month of the year, which is presumably why the recipe offers dates as an interchangeable substitute. Quick breads of this type filled the gap between bread and cake in the American household of the period, requiring no proofing, no kneading and no judgment about a yeast dough.