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Nut Brown Bread
Three cups of graham flour; one cup of molasses; a large cup of flour; a teaspoon of soda; pinch of salt. Mix ingredients thoroughly and at the last minute add threefourths cup of chopped nuts. Bake in slow oven at first and then increase the heat. Bake about an hour.
A plain molasses quick bread of the type that filled the tea table between about 1890 and 1920. As printed it is missing something, and that is the first thing to settle before you turn on the oven.
- The liquid is missingFour cups of flour and one cup of molasses will not come together into a batter. Comparable brown breads of the period take about two cups of sour milk or buttermilk, added with the molasses; without it you have crumbs. Treat the printed list as incomplete rather than as a stiff dough.
- Graham flourGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, milled with the bran and germ left in. Modern stone-ground whole wheat is the nearest thing; ordinary whole-wheat flour works but gives a finer, tighter crumb.
- "A large cup of flour"Plain white flour, measured generously — call it a rounded cup. Cup measures were not yet fully standardised, so treat the quantity as approximate.
- Soda and molassesThe single teaspoon of soda is doing all the leavening, and it needs acid to work against. Molasses supplies some; buttermilk or sour milk supplies the rest. With sweet milk and no acid the loaf will taste faintly soapy and rise poorly.
- Oven temperaturesA slow oven of this period is usually reckoned at roughly 300–325°F; start there and raise the heat to 350–375°F once the loaf has set. The slow start lets the centre set before the crust hardens, which matters in a dense, sugary batter that scorches easily.
- The nutsAdded last so they are not broken down by mixing. Walnuts or hickory nuts are the likely candidates in an American kitchen of this date; toast them first if you want the flavour to carry against the molasses.
- Pan and yieldA well-greased loaf tin, generously buttered; with the liquid added the quantity is large, so be prepared to divide it between two tins. An hour is about right; test with a skewer, and expect a moist, close crumb rather than a light one.
Nut brown bread belongs to the American family of molasses-and-whole-meal quick breads often associated with Boston brown bread, the steamed rye-and-cornmeal loaf traditionally eaten with baked beans. By the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book — Butterick being the dress-pattern firm, whose household titles were sold alongside its magazines to the same middle-class readership — baked loaves raised with soda, needing no yeast, no proving and no steaming kettle, sat alongside the steamed version, which remained current well into the twentieth century. Graham flour carried its own associations: it is named for Sylvester Graham, the temperance preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who argued that unbolted wheat was morally as well as physically superior to white, and by 1900 his name had settled quietly onto a bag of flour in the pantry. The chopped nuts are the touch that marks the recipe as a tea bread rather than a supper bread, meant to be sliced thin and buttered.