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Milk and Water Bread
1 cup scalded milk 1 cup boiling water 1 tablespoon lard 1 tablespoon butter 21½ teaspoons salt 1 yeast cake dissolved in 1/4 cup lukewarm water 6 cups sifted flour, or one cup white flour and enough entire wheat flour to knead Prepare and bake as Water Bread. When entire wheat flour is used add three tablespoons molasses. Bread may be mixed, raised, and baked in five hours, by using one yeast cake. Bread made in this way has proved most satisfactory. It is usually mixed in the morning, and the cook is able to watch the dough while rising and keep it at uniform temperature. It is often desirable to place bowl containing dough in pan of water, keeping water at uniform temperature of from 95° to 100° F. Cooks who have not proved themselves satisfactory bread makers are successful when employing this method.
A lean everyday loaf from the era of compressed yeast, written as a variation on the book's Water Bread. The instructions assume you have that recipe in front of you, so the practical details are worth spelling out.
- The salt quantity is unreliableThe printed figure for salt cannot be right as it stands. For six cups of flour, 2 to 2½ teaspoons is the sensible amount; measure by that rather than by the page.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake here is a small compressed fresh cake, roughly two-thirds of an ounce. One packet (2¼ teaspoons) of active dry yeast, softened in the quarter cup of lukewarm water, is the direct replacement.
- Scalded milkScalding was traditionally done to deal with something in raw milk that slackens dough; it is often explained as enzymes, though whey proteins are the likelier cause. Many cooks skip it with pasteurised milk, and heating the milk then letting it cool to lukewarm is in any case a quick way to get the liquid to the right temperature. Do not add hot milk to the yeast.
- Entire wheat flourThis is whole wheat. Note the second flour option gives no total quantity by design: whole wheat absorbs more liquid and varies by grind, so add until the dough is kneadable. The three tablespoons molasses in that version soften the bran flavour and feed the yeast.
- The water bathSetting the bowl in a pan of water held at 95-100F is the temperature control the recipe recommends, though it presents this as "often desirable" and credits the five-hour schedule to using one yeast cake. Modern equivalents are a turned-off oven with the light on or a proofing setting. Much above 105F the dough rises fast and can taste yeasty.
- Oven and donenessThe recipe gives no temperature; it sends you to Water Bread. In a modern oven, around 400F for 35 to 45 minutes suits loaves of this size. They are done at an internal temperature of 190-200F and should sound hollow when tapped on the bottom.
- FatsThe tablespoon each of lard and butter is for tenderness and keeping quality as much as for flavour. Two tablespoons of butter can be used instead.
- YieldSix cups of flour makes two standard loaves in 8½ x 4½ inch pans.
Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book treats bread as a matter of measurement and temperature control rather than instinct, and this entry shows why: the closing lines read, at least on one plausible interpretation, as being addressed less to the housewife than to the hired cook, promising that even those who "have not proved themselves satisfactory bread makers" will succeed if the dough is held at a steady 95 to 100 degrees. That confidence rests on the compressed yeast cake, which became widely available in American cities in the late nineteenth century and cut rising times from an overnight affair with homemade or salt-rising ferments to a single working day. Milk-and-water bread appears to sit between a plainer and a richer loaf in the chapter, richer and softer than plain water bread, cheaper and lighter than an all-milk loaf, though a single page can only suggest as much. "Entire wheat flour" was the period term for whole wheat, then promoted with some enthusiasm on health grounds, and the molasses added with it reflects the standard American habit of sweetening a coarse loaf.