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Oatmeal Bread
1 cake FLEISCHMANN'S YEAST 1/2 cup lukewarm water 2 cups boiling water 2 cups rolled oats 1/4 cup sifted flour 1 teaspoonful salt Pour two cups of boiling water over oatmeal, cover and let stand until lukewarm. Dissolve yeast and sugar in onehalf cup lukewarm water, add shortening and add this to the oatmeal and water. Add one cup of flour, or enough to make an ordinary sponge. Beat well.
Cover and set aside in a moderately warm place to rise for one hour, or until light.
Add enough flour to make a doughabout three cups, and the salt. Knead well, or "throw and roll." Place in greased bowl, cover and let rise in a moderately warm place, until double in bulk-about one and one-half hours.
Mould into loaves, fill well-greased pans half full, cover and let rise again about one hour. Bake forty-five minutes in a hot oven.
One-half cup of chopped nuts may be added, if desired.
Oatmeal bread provides a remarkable amount of nourishment at very little expense. It's mighty good, too!
A straightforward sponge-method oatmeal loaf from a Fleischmann's-sponsored chapter, with an ingredient list that has clearly lost a line or two in typesetting. Read the method rather than the list.
- The list is incompleteThe method calls for sugar and shortening, neither of which appears in the ingredients. Something on the order of 2 tablespoons sugar (or molasses) and 2 tablespoons butter, lard or shortening will do; note that the recipe as written adds the shortening to the dissolved yeast rather than to the hot oatmeal.
- "1/4 cup sifted flour" is a misprintThe instructions ask for one cup for the sponge and about three more for the dough. Plan on 4 to 4 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour total.
- Yeast cake conversionOne cake of Fleischmann's compressed yeast is about 0.6 oz. Substitute one packet of active dry yeast, roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons, dissolved in the half cup of lukewarm water with the sugar.
- Let the oatmeal cool properlyTwo cups of boiling water on two cups of rolled oats makes a thick, heat-retaining porridge. Water much above about 130F will kill the yeast, so wait until it is genuinely lukewarm to the finger, not merely no longer steaming, before combining.
- Rolled oats, not instantOld-fashioned rolled oats give the texture the recipe expects. Steel-cut oats will not soften enough in this soak; instant oats turn to paste.
- "Throw and roll"Apparently a period phrase for slapping the dough down on the board and rolling it over on itself, much like a modern slap-and-fold, though the book does not explain it. Oatmeal doughs are slack and sticky; resist adding much flour beyond the three cups.
- A hot ovenPeriod tables put a hot oven at roughly 400 to 425F; the book gives no temperature and no pan size. Forty-five minutes at that heat suits loaf-sized pans; the loaves should read about 200F internally and sound hollow.
- YieldProbably two loaves, judging by the flour. "Fill well-greased pans half full" is the guide -- the dough roughly doubles again in the pan.
The Bride's Cook Book belongs to a long line of promotional cookery published by the Fleischmann company, which had been selling compressed yeast since the late 1860s in Cincinnati, with wide promotion from 1876, and spent decades persuading American women that packaged yeast was more reliable than a homemade sponge or a saved bit of dough. The closing lines here -- nourishment at little expense, and "it's mighty good, too" -- are advertising copy as much as cookery. Oatmeal bread itself is far older than the leaflet, generally traced to Scottish and northern English baking, where oats grew where wheat would not; the American version softens the oats in boiling water first, which gelatinizes the starch and gives the loaf its characteristic moist crumb and long keeping.