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Colonial Sandwiches
Make one-half the recipe for Milk and Water Bread (see p. 54), using entire-wheat flour, and adding one and one.. half tablespoons molasses, and after the first rising adding, while kneading, one-half cup, each, candied orange peel finely cut and pecan nut meats broken in pieces. Put into buttered one-pound baking-powder tins until one-third full; let rise and bake. Cool, and make into sandwiches.
This is a nut-and-peel tea bread baked in cylindrical tins so it can be sliced into rounds, then filled. The instructions assume you have the plain bread recipe from earlier in the book and know how bread should look at each stage.
- You need the base recipeHalf of the Milk and Water Bread on p. 54 is the starting point, so the flour, liquid and yeast quantities are not repeated here. Do not try to reconstruct them from this page alone; work from the original bread recipe and halve it.
- Entire-wheat flourThis is whole wheat flour, though period "entire-wheat" was often a finer, lighter grind than today's stone-ground. A dough made with all modern whole wheat will be denser; substituting a quarter of it with bread flour keeps the crumb sliceable.
- One-pound baking-powder tinsThese were straight-sided cylinders holding roughly 2 cups, about the size of a 15 oz can. Two or three well-buttered 15 oz cans, or 4-inch mini panettone molds, give the same round slices. Filling them one-third full is deliberate, leaving room for a full rise into a domed cylinder.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none and assumes you know bread heat. A moderate oven of about 375F suits tins this small, roughly 30 to 40 minutes, until the loaves sound hollow and read around 190F at the center. Molasses and candied peel brown fast, so tent with foil if the tops darken early.
- When to add the fruit and nutsWorking the peel and pecans in after the first rise is the hinge of the recipe. Added at mixing, the sugary peel slows the yeast and the nut fragments cut the developing gluten; folded in later, they stay in distinct pieces and the loaf still rises.
- Candied orange peelCommercial candied peel is often dry and bitter. Soak it briefly in warm water or orange juice and pat dry, or candy your own; either way cut it small, as large pieces tear the slices.
- Cooling before slicingCool completely, ideally several hours, before turning the loaves out and slicing thin. Warm nut bread crumbles under a knife, and these rounds need to hold a filling.
- Filling and yieldThe book leaves the filling to you; cream cheese thinned with a little cream, or butter creamed with grated orange rind, would suit these sweet rounds. Yield depends on how much dough half the base recipe makes and how thin you slice, but expect a few dozen rounds, or half that number of sandwiches, from two 15 oz cans.
The name is decorative rather than historical: by the 1900s "colonial" was often attached to food that was brown, molasses-sweetened and old-fashioned in look, and baking a batter or dough in a cylindrical tin does echo New England practice, where Boston brown bread was steamed in cans to give the same round slices. Sandwich recipes of this kind belong to the fashion for afternoon tea and ladies' luncheons, where the point of a sandwich was its appearance as much as its filling, and a small round loaf studded with orange peel and pecans produced neat, patterned slices that needed no trimming. Empty baking-powder tins were commonly saved and reused as improvised kitchen equipment in this period, for exactly this kind of baking.