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Bread, Biscuits, Muffins and Waffles
SHORT METHOD FOR BREAD MAK- free from draft, until light about one ING. full. Cover and let rise one hour, or until double in bulk. Bake forty-five to sixty minutes.
If a richer loaf is desired, use milk in place of part or all of the water.
This page has come through the scanner badly: two columns of type have been merged, so the ingredient list and the first half of the method are missing and the surviving sentences run into one another. What remains is the tail of a straight-dough bread recipe, and it is readable as guidance rather than as a working formula.
- The text is incompleteNothing here gives flour, water, yeast, salt or sugar quantities, and the phrase "until light about one ... full" is a broken line referring to a pan filled to a certain level. Treat this as a period note on method, not a recipe to follow start to finish.
- "Light"In turn-of-the-century bread language a dough is light when it has risen and feels puffed and springy, not when it is pale. It is the same idea as "double in bulk" used two lines later.
- "Free from draft"Old kitchens were cold and drafty, so recipes fuss about placement. A warm spot of roughly 75-80F is the sort of condition the one-hour rise assumes; a cooler kitchen will take noticeably longer.
- Pan fill levelThe lost words appear to have given a pan-filling level ("about one ... full"), but how much cannot be recovered from what survives; half full is one common instruction for a shaped loaf.
- Oven heatNo temperature appears in the surviving text; any direction the recipe gave may have been lost with the missing column. As a modern equivalent, a loaf of this kind bakes at 375-400F, which is consistent with 45 to 60 minutes; an internal temperature of 195-205F indicates doneness.
- Milk in place of waterPeriod bread recipes often direct that milk be scalded before use, the usual explanation being that untreated milk weakens the dough. Pasteurized milk is generally used without scalding, though warming it to blood heat still suits the yeast.
"Short method" was a selling point in American bread recipes once reliable compressed yeast became widely available in the later nineteenth century. The older household practice was a sponge set overnight with homemade or barm yeast, mixed down in the morning and given several long rises, and cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s commonly distinguish that slow route from a straight dough that could be mixed, risen once or twice, and baked in a single afternoon. The offer of milk "in place of part or all of the water" for a richer loaf is the same shorthand still used today, milk fat and milk solids giving a softer crumb and a browner crust.