Nut Bread
1½ cups sifted white flour. 1 level teaspoon salt 2 teaspoons sugar 1¾ cups sweet milk 1½ cups sifted whole wheat flour 1/2 cup chopped nut meats 3 level teaspoons Calumet Baking Powder Mix and bake the same as Colonial Bread.
A short advertising-book formula that leans on another recipe for its method, and whose proportions do not quite stand on their own. Read the notes before mixing.
- The missing method"Mix and bake the same as Colonial Bread" points to a companion recipe elsewhere in the same book, which is not reproduced here; you will need that entry for the mixing and baking directions. Judging by the proportions, this is a batter quick bread rather than a kneaded dough.
- The flour-to-milk ratio is offOne and three-quarter cups of milk to one and a half cups of flour gives something close to pancake batter rather than a loaf. Whether this is a printer's error or a quantity that depended on the companion recipe cannot be settled from the text as printed. Expect to add flour until you have a thick, sluggish batter that drops rather than pours.
- Calumet baking powderCalumet was sold as a double-acting powder of the alum-phosphate type, and the book exists to sell it. Any modern double-acting powder substitutes measure for measure. Three teaspoons to a cup and a half of flour is generous even so; with more flour it works out near normal, but with the flour as printed it will taste soapy.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh whole milk, specified to distinguish it from the soured or buttermilk that period recipes paired with saleratus.
- Nut meatsShelled nuts, chopped. Black walnut, hickory and pecan were the usual American choices; English walnut is the closest supermarket equivalent. Toasting them first is not in the original but improves a plain loaf considerably.
- Oven and timeThe original gives no temperature or time; both come from the Colonial Bread entry it refers to. Failing that, treat it as a moderate oven and reckon on 45 to 60 minutes for a single loaf in an 8x4-inch pan; test with a skewer at the centre, and tent with foil if the crust darkens early.
- Whole wheat behaviourLetting the batter stand ten minutes before it goes in the pan gives the bran time to hydrate and reduces grittiness.
- Yield and keepingOne small loaf, about ten slices. Quick breads of this type slice cleanly only after cooling completely, and are better on the second day.
Reliable Recipes was published by the Calumet Baking Powder Company of Chicago, one of dozens of manufacturer-issued booklets that circulated free or near-free in the first decades of the twentieth century. Nut bread belongs squarely to that moment: chemically leavened loaves, mixed in minutes and baked in a pan rather than proofed and shaped, became a fixture once reliable double-acting powders made the result predictable. The cross-reference to "Colonial Bread" is typical of the format, where a single mixing method is written out once and then varied to fill pages and sell tins. Whole wheat here is a mark of the era's mild health enthusiasm, and the nuts of a homely thrift, since hickory and black walnuts were gathered rather than bought across much of the country.