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Baking Powder Bread (Because we in hotels)
Because we in hotels are accustomed to make every article as rich as is allowed it should not be forgotten that shortening is by no means essential to make good biscuit, and the preceding receipt for biscuit is just right for loaves of baking powder bread if the shortening be left out.
This is a variation note rather than a standalone formula: it sends you back to the author's biscuit dough, minus the fat, baked as loaves. The points below cover what that substitution actually changes.
- You need the preceding recipeThe instruction is meaningless on its own. Find the biscuit receipt immediately above it in the book and read its proportions of flour, baking powder, salt and liquid before you start, since those are the whole of the ingredient list here.
- What "shortening" meantIn a hotel kitchen of this period this would usually have been lard or butter, or a blend, though commercial compound fats were also in use; the recipe itself does not specify. Leaving it out gives a lean chemically leavened loaf, closer to a large scone or to soda bread than to anything enriched.
- Baking powder proportionModern practice is about 1 to 1 1/4 teaspoons of baking powder per cup of flour. Period formulas sometimes call for noticeably more than that; if so, taste is the guide, since an excess reads as soapy in the crumb.
- Handle it onceWith no fat to shorten the gluten strands, overworking shows immediately as a tough, tight crumb. Bring the dough together with as few strokes as will hydrate the flour, shape it, and get it into the oven.
- Oven and panA biscuit oven is hot enough to set a loaf's crust long before the centre cooks. Bake in a greased loaf pan at 375F, or as a free-form round on a sheet, for roughly 35 to 45 minutes; the internal temperature should read about 200F.
- Bake at onceChemical leavening begins working the moment the liquid goes in. Any dough left standing while the oven comes up to heat loses lift, and a fat-free dough has little structure to trap gas in the first place.
- It will not keepA lean quick bread stales fast. Best eaten warm the day it is made, or later toasted or as the base for something sauced.
Jessup Whitehead wrote for professional hotel and restaurant cooks in the American Midwest in the late nineteenth century, and the aside here is characteristic of him: a working chef pausing to admit that the lavish house style is not the only correct one. Commercial baking powder was by then well established alongside older kitchen practice. Cooks of an earlier generation had raised quick breads with saleratus or pearlash activated by sour milk or molasses, a method that demanded judgement and could leave an alkaline aftertaste, while commercially blended baking powders combining an acid salt with bicarbonate of soda made the same result more repeatable. That reliability is part of what lets Whitehead treat biscuit dough and loaf bread as one formula with a single variable: it needs no yeast, no proofing time, and in this leanest version no fat at all.