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Nut Bread (Tsp Royal bak pow tsp salt)
4 tsp. Royal bak. pow. 1 tsp. salt 4 cups flour (3 graham, 1 white)
— Inez B. Curtis
4 cups flour 4 tsp. Royal bak. powder 1 cup chopped nuts 3/4 cup sugar (small) 1 egg 1½ cups milk Let rise 20 minutes, then bake in moderate oven.
— Mrs. Clifton M. Tracy
Two contributors' versions of the same quick loaf sit side by side here, and only the second is complete. The Curtis entry gives leavening, salt and a flour blend but no liquid, sugar or nuts, so treat it as a note on flour proportions rather than a working formula.
- Use the Tracy versionMrs. Tracy's list is the one that can actually be baked: 4 cups flour, 4 tsp baking powder, 1 cup chopped nuts, 3/4 cup sugar, 1 egg, 1 1/2 cups milk. Add the 1 tsp salt from the Curtis entry, which the Tracy list omits, and consider her flour split of three parts graham to one part white.
- Graham flourGraham is coarsely ground whole wheat, still sold under that name. Ordinary whole-wheat flour substitutes directly, though the loaf will be slightly finer in crumb and may want an extra tablespoon or two of milk.
- Royal baking powderRoyal was a cream-of-tartar powder, single-acting: it released most of its gas on contact with the milk. Modern double-acting powder is stronger and slower, so 3 tsp is ample for 4 cups of flour and will taste less sharp.
- "Let rise 20 minutes"Nothing is rising in the yeast sense. This is a rest for the batter in the pan, which lets the graham flour hydrate and softens the crumb. With double-acting powder the rest is harmless; with an old-style tartrate powder it was a gamble.
- Moderate oven350F. A loaf this size needs about 55 to 65 minutes; a skewer in the centre should come out clean and the internal temperature should reach roughly 200F.
- Pan and yieldFour cups of flour makes a large quantity of batter, more than a single 9x5-inch loaf pan will comfortably hold; dividing it between two pans is safer, at roughly 40 to 45 minutes. Grease well and line the base, as sweetened whole-wheat batters stick.
- The nutsThe recipe does not say which; walnuts or hickory nuts would both be plausible choices for the time and place. Toss the chopped nuts through the dry flour before adding the milk so they do not sink.
- SlicingQuick breads leavened this heavily crumble while hot. Cool the loaf completely, ideally wrap it and leave it overnight, before cutting.
Nut bread of this kind belongs to the great American vogue for chemically leavened quick breads that ran from the 1890s through the 1920s, once reliable canned baking powder made a loaf possible in an afternoon rather than a day. Church and society cookbooks like this one are full of them, usually contributed by name, and the brand loyalty is worth noting: both cooks specify Royal rather than simply "baking powder," a habit encouraged by decades of aggressive advertising and by the genuine differences between tartrate, phosphate and alum powders then on the market. Graham flour carries its own history, taking its name from Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer who campaigned for coarse unbolted wheat; by 1900 the moral argument had faded and graham was simply a flour people liked the taste of. The duplication of two nearly identical recipes, one of them garbled, is characteristic of these compiled fundraising books, which were typeset from handwritten cards with little editorial interference.