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Olympic Bread
A short method of making three loaves, or two loaves and twelve biscuits: 1¼ pints tepid water 2½ tablespoons sugar (level) 1 2 1 tablespoon salt (level) cakes compressed yeast tablespoon shortening Olympic flour, well sifted before measuring, enough to make a smooth dough, about 1½ quarts.
Dissolve yeast in part of water, salt and sugar in remainder. Combine, and add Olympic flour to make a smooth batter. Beat till free from lumps, then add rest of flour, sufficient to make a smooth dough. Add melted lard or oil. Knead well, put in greased bowl to rise till double the bulk. Knead down, and let rise again till double the bulk. Mold into loaves, let rise till light, bake in moderate oven.
A plain straight-dough white bread from a miller's promotional booklet, written for cooks who already knew how bread should feel. The quantities are sound; only the yeast and the oven need translating.
- YeastTwo cakes of compressed (fresh) yeast, the most likely reading of the garbled ingredient line, is about 1.2 oz, which converts to roughly 2 packets, or 4 1/2 teaspoons, of instant or active dry yeast. That is a brisk amount by modern standards and should give fairly quick rises in a warm room.
- Flour measure1 1/2 quarts of sifted flour is 6 cups, or roughly 1 1/2 lb. Sifting before measuring matters here: unsifted flour packs into the cup and you will end up with a stiff, dry dough. Treat the figure as a target and stop adding when the dough is smooth and only slightly tacky.
- Liquid1 1/4 pints is 2 1/2 cups. Tepid means about 100F for fresh yeast; if you are using dry yeast, the same temperature is fine.
- "Moderate oven"The recipe gives no temperature; a moderate oven is usually taken as 350-375F. Loaves of this size take 35 to 45 minutes; an internal temperature of 200F to 205F is a more reliable test than tapping the crust.
- ShorteningOne tablespoon of melted lard or oil for six cups of flour is a very lean enrichment, giving a chewy, plain-bread crumb rather than a soft sandwich loaf. Butter substitutes directly if you prefer.
- Adding the fat lateThe fat goes in after the flour, once the dough is formed. Following that order does no harm, though with only a tablespoon of fat any difference to gluten development is slight.
- "Biscuits"Here this most likely means small dinner rolls rather than baking-powder biscuits. Twelve of them would bake in about 15 to 20 minutes at the same temperature.
- Yield and pansThree loaves from this dough means modest ones: divide among three 8 x 4 inch pans, or use two 9 x 5 inch pans and pull off a third of the dough for rolls.
Olympic was a flour brand of the Portland Flouring Mills in the Pacific Northwest, and the booklet belongs to a large family of early twentieth-century booklets given away or sold cheaply by millers to keep their name in a new housekeeper's kitchen. That is likely why the flour is named by brand in the method, and why the recipe promises a "short method": branded flour cookbooks are generally said to have competed on convenience, suggesting that a cook could turn out three loaves in a morning without an overnight sponge. The doubled yeast, the straight dough and the two quick rises are all part of that pitch. The unit of yeast is itself a period marker: compressed yeast was sold in foil-wrapped cakes, and recipes counting cakes rather than spoonfuls date from the decades before dry granulated yeast, introduced in the 1940s, spread through household kitchens in the years that followed.