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Oatmeal Bread (Teaspoons baking powder cups)
teaspoons baking powder cups Northern flour teaspoonful salt tablespoonful sugar or molasses cups cooked Ravalli oatmeal egg 1/2 cup milk or water Beat egg and add to milk and oatmeal, also salt and sugar. Add flour and baking powder, sifted; mix thoroughly and knead well. Bake in moderate oven.
The quantities have dropped out of this text — every number that preceded "teaspoons," "cups" and so on is missing, so this reads as a method rather than a formula. Treat it as a guide to technique and borrow proportions from a standard oatmeal quick bread.
- The missing numbersOnly "1/2 cup milk or water" survives as a written-out quantity, though the singular forms "teaspoonful salt" and "tablespoonful sugar or molasses" imply one of each. The baking powder, the flour and the cooked oatmeal are unquantified, and there is no honest way to reconstruct the original amounts. For reference, a workable ratio for this style is roughly 2 cups flour, 1 cup cooked oatmeal, 2 to 3 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt.
- Moderate ovenConventionally about 350 to 375F; the book itself gives no temperature. Reckon on 40 to 50 minutes for an ordinary loaf, but with the quantities missing the size is a guess; test with a skewer at the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Ravalli oatmealAlmost certainly a regional milling name rather than a distinct grain, though the brand itself cannot be confirmed. Any rolled oats, cooked to a thick porridge and cooled to room temperature before it meets the egg, will do. Hot oatmeal will scramble the egg and slacken the dough.
- Northern flourLikely either a trade name or a general term for hard spring wheat flour from the northern plains, higher in protein; the specific brand cannot be confirmed. Ordinary all-purpose flour is the substitute; bread flour if you want the loaf to hold a taller shape.
- "Knead well" is misleadingThis is a baking-powder bread, not a yeast bread. Prolonged kneading develops gluten and drives off the leavening gas before it reaches the oven. Bring the dough together on a floured board with a dozen quick folds and stop.
- Sugar or molassesA tablespoonful either way, as the text has it. Molasses darkens the crumb, adds a faint acidity that works with the baking powder, and helps keep the loaf moist.
- Pan and yieldBoth are guesswork with the quantities missing; the reconstruction suggested above would suit one small greased loaf tin. The cooked oatmeal makes a moist, close crumb that slices better after several hours' cooling.
Oatmeal breads leavened with baking powder rather than yeast belong to a broad class of North American quick breads that expanded rapidly after chemical leavening became cheap and reliable in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their practical appeal was thrift: yesterday's breakfast porridge, which would otherwise be fried in slices or thrown out, went straight into the dough and stretched the wheat flour. The two names embedded in this recipe — "Northern flour" and "Ravalli oatmeal" — point to the book's origins, Ravalli being a county in western Montana. The method here assumes a cook who already knows what a loaf should look like and needs telling only the order of operations.