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Colonial Bread
3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder 3 cups sifted flour I level teaspoon salt 1 mixing spoon sugar cups sweet milk 1/2 cup chopped nuts 1/2 cup chopped raisins Sift flour, baking powder and salt together three times, add other ingredients and mix thoroughly with a spatula or the rounding side of mixing spoon. Put in ungreased pan and bake one hour in slow oven. It makes much better bread if baked in round corrugated pans. 2 cups yellow cornmeal
A baking-powder quick bread from a Calumet promotional booklet, leavened chemically rather than with yeast. Two figures in the ingredient list need care before you start.
- The milk quantity is missingThe list reads only "cups sweet milk" with no number. For 3 cups flour plus 2 cups cornmeal a pourable quick-bread batter would take roughly 2 to 2 1/2 cups; treat that as a judgement call rather than the original measure.
- Cornmeal belongs in the batterThe 2 cups of yellow cornmeal sit at the foot of the recipe rather than with the other dry goods. Sift or whisk it in with the flour, baking powder and salt so it is evenly distributed.
- "Slow oven"300 to 325F. An hour at that temperature suits a dense cornmeal loaf; a hotter oven sets the crust before the centre cooks through.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, named to distinguish it from sour milk or buttermilk, which would have called for soda instead of baking powder. Do not substitute buttermilk here.
- "1 mixing spoon sugar"An unstandardised measure; a mixing or serving spoon would have held something in the region of one to two tablespoons. Two level tablespoons is a reasonable reading; this is a barely sweet bread.
- Sifting three timesRepeated sifting was standard practice in booklets of this kind, to aerate the flour and distribute the leavener. With modern powder one thorough whisking distributes it adequately.
- Ungreased panThe recipe specifies an ungreased pan. In a modern nonstick or glass pan the loaf will still release, but greasing does no harm and helps with the corrugated tin the recipe recommends.
- YieldAbout one large loaf, or two smaller ones. Test with a skewer at 55 minutes; the nuts and raisins make the crumb look wetter than it is.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of many booklets given away to teach cooks to depend on a branded chemical leavener rather than yeast or homemade mixtures of cream of tartar and soda. The name "Colonial Bread" is marketing rather than history: cornmeal, raisins and nuts do echo genuinely early American loaves such as rye-and-Indian bread and steamed brown bread, but those were leavened with yeast or with pearlash, and commercial baking powder of the kind sold here did not appear until around the middle of the nineteenth century. Sweetened fruit-and-nut breads of this type were often served sliced thin with butter for tea rather than as a table bread.