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Rolled Oats Bread
Let one cup of rolled oats stand for an hour in two cups of boiling water. Add one-half yeast cake dissolved in one-half cup lukewarm water, one-half cup of molasses, one-half teaspoon salt and one tablespoon of melted butter. Then stir in four and one-half cups of sifted flour and set away to rise. Beat thoroughly, place in greased bread pans, let rise again, and bake.
A straightforward molasses-sweetened oatmeal loaf from the era when bread recipes assumed the cook already knew what to do. The original omits temperature, times and yield, so all three need supplying.
- Cool the oats firstThis is the hinge. After an hour the soaked oats may still be warm enough to kill yeast, so check that the mixture is no more than lukewarm (below about 110F) before the dissolved yeast goes in.
- Yeast cake conversionHalf a compressed yeast cake is roughly 1 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Dissolve active dry in the half cup of lukewarm water as written; instant can be stirred straight into the flour.
- Rolled oatsOld-fashioned rolled oats are the right choice. Quick oats will work but absorb faster and give a pastier crumb; steel-cut oats will not soften enough in an hour of soaking.
- MolassesUse unsulphured baking molasses, not blackstrap, which is markedly more bitter than what the period sold as plain molasses.
- Flour and consistencyFour and a half cups is a guide, not a rule. With three cups of liquid to four and a half cups of flour this is a very soft, slack dough, closer to a thick batter than a kneadable one; add flour a spoonful at a time only if it is too slack to handle.
- Rising timesFirst rise about 1 1/2 hours until doubled; after shaping, 45 minutes to an hour in the pans. Molasses and oats slow fermentation, so judge by volume rather than the clock.
- OvenBake at 375F for 40 to 45 minutes. The loaf is done at 200 to 205F in the centre and sounds hollow when tapped on the bottom.
- YieldEnough for two small loaves; the recipe says "bread pans," plural. "Beat thoroughly" after the first rise means just that with a dough this soft: beat it down to redistribute the gas before it goes into the pans.
Oatmeal breads spread through American home baking in the decades after rolled oats became a cheap grocery staple; steam-rolling mills of the 1870s and 1880s turned oats from a laborious porridge grain into something a cook could soak in boiling water and use the same afternoon. Pairing them with molasses is a New England habit of long standing, molasses being a common everyday sweetener in the northeastern kitchen into the twentieth century, and it does more than sweeten: the retained moisture keeps an oat loaf soft for days. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book to the same audience of practical housekeepers, which may explain the shorthand ending here "and bake" with no further detail.