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Bread Making (Morning add the egg)
6. In the morning add the egg well-beaten and cook the same as plain griddle cakes.
Raised Muffins. oven. 1 t. salt 4 T. sugar ½ C. milk or milk and water 1. Scald liquid. 2. Add salt, sugar and shortening. 2 T. butter or lard of 1 yeast cake 4 C. bread flour 3. Soften yeast cake in 1 T. luke warm water. 4. When liquid is luke warm add softened yeast and flour. 5. Beat well, cover and set in warm place to rise. 6. When light add egg well beaten. 7. Pour into well greased muffin pans and bake in moderate Bread. 1 C. boiling water or 1 t. lard scalded milk 1/4 yeast cake 1 t. salt 3 C. flour 1 T. sugar Follow general directions for bread baking.
Raisin Bread. 1 C. scalded milk 1 t. lard 1 t. salt + yeast cake 3 T. sugar 3 C. flour 2 1/2 C. raisins (seeded) 1. Follow general directions for bread making. 2. Before forming dough into loaves stir in the raisins which have been washed and cut in halves.
Graham Bread. 1 C. scalded milk 1 t. sugar 1 t. salt 1/4 yeast cake 1 t. lard 1½ C. bread flour 2 C. (?) graham flour 1. Make a sponge of the first six ingredients following the general directions for breadmaking. 2. When the sponge is light, add enough graham flour to make the dough stiff enough to knead. 3. Let rise until light, then form into loaves and let rise again. 4. Bake well in a moderate oven.
Raised Biscuits.
Any of the above bread doughs may be made into biscuits instead of one loaf.
To form into biscuits roll the dough quite thin with rolling pin then cut with biscuit cutter or cut the dough into equal portions with a knife and shape into round balls with the fingers.
A hotter oven is needed for baking biscuits than for bread.
A page of straight yeast doughs from a school cookery manual, written in the telegraphic style of a class handout: ingredient columns run together and the method assumes the general bread lesson taught earlier in the book. The proportions are sound once you read them apart.
- Oven temperaturesThe book gives no figures. "Moderate oven" is usually read as somewhere around 350-375F for loaves and muffins, and the note that biscuits want a hotter oven would put them nearer 400-425F.
- Yeast cakesA yeast cake was a small compressed cake of fresh yeast, commonly reckoned at about 0.6 oz, though sizes varied. A quarter cake is a very small amount of leaven, implying a long slow rise. As a working equivalent, 1 full cake is usually taken as about 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry yeast, so a quarter cake is roughly 1/2 teaspoon.
- Scalding the liquidMilk was scalded partly to deal with raw milk and because scalding denatures whey proteins that would otherwise slacken gluten. With pasteurised milk this is generally held to be unnecessary; warming the milk is enough. Whatever the liquid, the muffin method insists it be lukewarm before the yeast goes in.
- The egg in the muffinsThe ingredient list for the raised muffins has lost its egg quantity even though step 6 calls for one. One egg would be a plausible proportion for the 4 cups of flour here.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, milled with the bran and germ returned. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing. It absorbs more water than white flour and rises more slowly, which is why the method builds a white-flour sponge first.
- Bread flourThen as now this means a higher-protein wheat flour. The small loaves here are based on 3 cups of flour, which gives one modest loaf in a 8x4 inch pan rather than the large pan sizes common today.
- Judging "light""When light" and "let rise until light" mean roughly doubled and slack to the touch, not merely puffed. With the quarter-cake quantities given, expect several hours at room temperature, or an overnight rise for the batter that is mixed the night before.
- RaisinsThe recipe calls for seeded raisins, from an era before seedless varieties were the default; with modern raisins there is nothing to remove. Washing them still helps, and the recipe adds them after the first rise, before shaping.
- YieldEach bread formula is built on 3 cups of flour and makes one small loaf, or a batch of biscuits. The muffin batter uses 4 cups of flour and will fill well more than a dozen standard cups.
Manuals like this one are often taken to belong to the domestic-science movement that put cookery into American public schools in the decades around 1900, though the format is the only evidence for it. Something like a teaching method shows in the layout: one "general directions for bread making" lesson is given once, and every later formula is reduced to the variation from it, so a reader learns a single technique and then applies it to plain, raisin and graham doughs in turn. Graham flour takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the nineteenth-century American preacher and dietary reformer who argued for unsifted whole-wheat meal against the fashionable white loaf; by the time this book was written the name had detached from his crusade and simply meant a flour on the grocer's shelf. The very small quantities of yeast, and the batter mixed at night to be finished in the morning, reflect kitchens where fresh yeast was bought a cake at a time and where slow overnight fermentation was the ordinary way to have hot bread at breakfast.