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Rolled Oats Bread
2 cups boiling water ½ cup molasses ½ tablepsoon salt 1 tablespoon butter 1½ yeast cake dissolved in ½ cup lukewarm water 1 cup rolled oats 5 cups flour.
Add boiling water to oats and let stand one hour; add molasses, salt, butter, dissolved yeast cake, and flour; let rise, beat thoroughly, turn into buttered bread pans, let rise again, and bake. To make shaping of biscuits easy, take up mixture by spoonfuls, drop into plate of flour, and have palms of hands well covered with flour before attempting to shape or drop from spoon into buttered muffin tins. 1 cup boiling water 1 cup rye flakes 2 tablespoons butter 1/3 cup molasses
A plain molasses-and-oat loaf from the yeast-bread chapter, printed with garbled fractions and with the beginning of the next recipe running on at the end. Read the ingredient list with some skepticism before you scale anything.
- The broken fractions"1½ cup molasses" and "1½ yeast cake dissolved in 1½ cup lukewarm water" are almost certainly typesetting corruptions of ⅓ cup molasses and ½ yeast cake in ½ cup water; a cup and a half of molasses against five cups of flour would give a sticky, barely risen loaf. Treat these figures as unreliable rather than as a formula to follow literally.
- The trailing linesThe final four ingredients — boiling water, rye flakes, butter, molasses — belong to a separate rye-flake bread that follows in the book. They are not part of this loaf. The sentence about shaping biscuits in a plate of flour is likewise stranded from a neighbouring recipe.
- Yeast cakeCompressed fresh yeast, sold in cakes whose weight varied by maker and period; the familiar modern cake is about ⅗ oz. If the reading of "½ yeast cake" is right, that is on the order of 1 to 1¼ teaspoons of instant or active dry yeast; if using active dry, proof it in the lukewarm water as written.
- Rolled oatsOld-fashioned rolled oats, not instant or steel-cut. The hour-long soak in boiling water is the hinge of the recipe: it gelatinizes the oats so they hold moisture, which is what keeps this loaf soft for days. Cutting the soak short leaves gritty flakes and a dry crumb.
- FlourHold back the last half cup and add it only if the dough will not come together — it should be soft and slightly tacky, not stiff.
- Rising and beatingThis is a batter-style dough: it is beaten rather than kneaded. First rise until doubled, about 1½ hours at room temperature; beat it down thoroughly, then pan it and let it rise until it crowns the tin, about 45 minutes.
- OvenNo temperature is given. Bake at 375°F for 45 to 50 minutes; molasses browns fast, so tent with foil if the top darkens early. Done at an internal temperature of about 200°F.
- YieldEnough for two standard 8½ × 4½-inch loaves, or one large one with a little left for rolls.
Oatmeal breads sweetened with molasses were a New England staple long before Fannie Farmer collected them, and they sit in this chapter alongside rye-and-Indian and brown breads that share the same logic: stretch expensive wheat flour with a cheaper grain, and sweeten with molasses rather than sugar, which was dearer. Molasses arrived in Boston by the barrel as a by-product of the West Indian sugar trade and remained the default sweetener in New England baking well into the twentieth century. Rolled oats themselves were relatively new as a packaged grocery item — steam-rolling made oats quick-cooking and shelf-stable in the last quarter of the nineteenth century — and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s were busy finding uses for them beyond the breakfast bowl. The mangled fractions and the stray lines from the following recipe are a reminder that these texts reach us through generations of resetting and reprinting, not from a manuscript.