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Royal Baking Powder Bread
4 cups flour 1 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon sugar 7 teaspoons Royal Baking Powder 1 medium-sized, cold, boiled potato water or milk or both Sift thoroughly together flour, salt, sugar and baking powder, rub in potato; add sufficient liquid to mix rapidly and smoothly into stiff batter or soft dough. This will require about one pint of liquid. Turn at once into greased loaf-pan, smooth top with knife dipped in melted butter, and allow to stand in warm place about 30 minutes. Bake in moderate oven about one hour. When done take from pan, moisten with hand dipped in cold water and allow to cool before putting away in bread box.
A yeastless loaf from a baking powder company's own cookbook, so the leavening is generous by design. A few conversions and one caveat about modern powder.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Bake on a rack in the lower third so the base sets before the crust colours; an hour is right for a full-size loaf.
- One pint of liquidTwo cups. Add it in stages — flour hydration varies, and you want a stiff batter that just holds a shape rather than a pourable one.
- The potatoAbout 5-6 oz boiled and cooled, something over half a cup once riced or grated. Rub it through the dry mix so no lumps remain; its starch holds water and helps keep the crumb moist.
- Seven teaspoons of baking powderThat is close to 1 3/4 teaspoons per cup of flour, where modern practice runs 1 to 1 1/4. Royal was a cream-of-tartar powder; today's double-acting sodium-aluminium powders at this dose can leave a distinctly metallic, soapy edge. Cutting to about 5 teaspoons gives a cleaner-tasting loaf.
- The 30-minute restPresumably to let the dough relax and the leavening begin working. With double-acting powder the second lift comes from oven heat, so the wait costs you little -- but do not stretch it much past half an hour.
- Pan and donenessA large loaf pan, well greased; 9x5-inch is a reasonable modern equivalent for this quantity. It is done at 200-205F in the centre; a hollow-sounding base is the older test.
- The wet hand at the endWiping the hot crust with cold water softens it as the loaf cools. Cool completely on a rack or the trapped steam will go gummy in the bread box.
- YieldOne loaf. Best on the day it is baked; quick breads stale faster than yeast loaves, potato or no.
The New Royal Cook Book belongs to a genre that shaped American home baking as much as any general cookbook: the free promotional booklet issued by an ingredient manufacturer. The Royal Baking Powder Company, whose product was built on cream of tartar rather than the cheaper alum-based powders it spent decades attacking in advertising, distributed these collections widely, and their purpose was plainly to encourage the use of the company's product. A baking powder bread is the boldest expression of that: a loaf that dispenses with yeast entirely, aimed at cooks who lacked a reliable barm or simply wanted bread in ninety minutes instead of a day. The boiled potato is older than the booklet, a fixture of German and American home baking, valued because potato starch holds water and keeps a crumb soft, and here it does the softening work that a long yeast fermentation would otherwise do.