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Calumet Brown Bread
1 cup of milk. 3½ teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 1/2 cup raisins, cut and dredged in flour 4 cups entire wheat flour 3 tablespoons melted butter 3/4 cup of water 1 egg 1/4 cup chopped nuts (if desired) Melt the butter, add sugar, beaten egg and mix well, add liquids gradually. Mix the dry ingredients and add gradually to first mixture. Add raisins and nuts, and bake in buttered tins 40 to 45 minutes in a moderate oven. 4 cups flour D teaspoons salt 11/2 level teaspoons lard
A quick bread from one of the baking-powder company booklets that flooded American kitchens in the early 1900s. It is a batter bread, leavened chemically rather than with yeast, so it comes together in minutes and goes straight into the oven.
- Get it into the oven fastBaking powder begins working the moment it meets liquid. Have the tins buttered and the oven at temperature before you combine wet and dry, and stir only until the flour disappears.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350F. A loaf in a standard 8x4-inch pan will need closer to 45-55 minutes than the 40-45 stated; the original assumed several small tins, which bake faster.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat flour. Whole wheat absorbs more liquid than white flour; expect a stiff batter and add a little more liquid if it will not drop from the spoon.
- The liquid looks shortThree-quarters of a cup of water against four cups of whole wheat flour will not hydrate the dough, and the method's 'add liquids gradually' suggests something has dropped out of the ingredient list. Brown breads of this size commonly take on the order of two cups of liquid, often milk or sour milk; add liquid until you have a thick, sticky batter.
- SugarThe method calls for sugar creamed into the melted butter, though no amount is given. Half a cup to two-thirds of a cup of brown sugar or molasses suits a loaf of this size.
- Baking powderThree and a half teaspoons is in the normal range for four cups of flour. Calumet was sold as a double-acting powder; any modern double-acting powder can stand in for it.
- Dredging the raisinsTossing the cut raisins in flour keeps them suspended rather than sinking to the bottom. Take the flour from the four cups already measured so the ratio does not shift.
- YieldOne standard loaf, or three or four small tins. Test with a skewer in the centre and let it cool at least twenty minutes before slicing, or the crumb will tear.
"Reliable Recipes" was a promotional booklet issued by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, and like Royal's and Rumford's rival pamphlets it is generally understood to have served the aim of making chemical leavening indispensable in the home kitchen. Traditional New England brown bread was steamed for hours in a covered mould, while a baking-powder version could be baked instead, a contrast of the kind such booklets were often said to emphasise. The whole wheat flour, raisins and nuts also place the loaf within the early twentieth-century enthusiasm for "entire wheat" as a wholesome, digestible alternative to white flour, a claim pushed by millers and health reformers alike.