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Rolled Oatmeal Bread
11/2 c. boiling water 11/2 c. cooked Quaker oats 1/2 yeast cake
What survives here is only the sponge — the wet start of an oatmeal bread. The flour, salt and sweetening that must follow are missing from the page, so treat this as a starting point to be finished with judgement rather than a complete formula.
- Yeast cakeCompressed yeast cakes varied in size across the period, so any equivalence is approximate; half a cake is somewhere in the region of a teaspoon of modern dry yeast. Compressed cake yeast was sold fresh and moist; dry yeast is the usual substitute, used at roughly a third to a half the weight of the fresh.
- "Cooked Quaker oats"This means cooked porridge made from rolled oats, not dry flakes. A cup and a half of cooked oatmeal is roughly what you get from something like 2/3 to 3/4 cup dry rolled oats cooked with water.
- Boiling water on the yeastThe order matters and the original does not spell it out. Boiling water must go onto the oats and be left to cool to lukewarm before the yeast is added, or the yeast is killed outright.
- The missing flourAn oatmeal bread on this scale would take somewhere between 4 and 5 cups of bread flour plus 1 to 2 teaspoons salt, worked in until the dough clears the bowl. The book gives no figure, so anyone baking from this page is working by feel.
- SweeteningMany period oatmeal breads carried molasses, brown sugar or honey — often 2 to 4 tablespoons — both for flavour and to feed the yeast. Its absence here may be another sign the entry is truncated.
- YieldThis quantity of liquid and oats, brought up with flour, makes roughly one large loaf. As modern guidance only, 375F for 35 to 45 minutes, to an internal temperature of about 200F, is a reasonable target; the book itself gives no temperature or time.
- Texture to expectCooked oats hold a great deal of water, so the dough will be slack and tacky compared with a plain white loaf. Resist flouring it into submission; the moisture is what gives oatmeal bread its close, damp crumb and long keeping.
Oatmeal bread of this kind belongs to a thrifty tradition of putting yesterday's breakfast porridge into today's dough — a practice often said to have been a household habit long before it was printed in community cookbooks. The brand name in the ingredient line is itself a period marker: Quaker Oats had made rolled oats a national grocery staple by the turn of the twentieth century, and church and society cookbooks like the Philathea readily used the trade name as shorthand for the product. Philathea cookbooks were compiled by the Philathea classes, adult Bible-study groups for young women that began in the 1890s — the Baraca-Philathea movement is traced to a Baptist church in Syracuse, New York — and spread through Baptist and other Protestant churches in the early 1900s, and they were sold to raise funds. Such books tended to be set from handwritten contributions with little editing, which is why entries occasionally arrive, as this one has, with the ingredients recorded and the method assumed to be common knowledge.