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Oatmeal Bread
Rub a quarter of a pound of butter into a pound and a half of flour and when it is smooth mix in two tablespoonfuls of brown sugar, a saltspoonful of salt and half a pound of oatmeal. When they are thoroughly mixed make a well in the center, in which place two tablespoonfuls of brewers' yeast, cover this over with a cloth and stand to rise for an hour. Afterward work the mixture up with enough warm milk to form a dough, divide it into portions and mould it into cakes. When they are cooked split the cakes open, butter them, close them again, put them on a hot dish, and serve quickly.
A yeast-raised oat cake baked in portions rather than a loaf, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen: no oven temperature, no baking time, and no yield. Everything below fills those gaps.
- The hinge: the yeast needs liquidAs written, two tablespoonfuls of yeast go into a dry well of flour and oatmeal and sit an hour. Brewers' yeast was a wet barm, so it carried its own moisture, but a modern dry or fresh yeast set into dry flour will do nothing. Dissolve the yeast in a little of the warm milk first and let that sponge work in the well for the hour.
- Brewers' yeastThis means liquid barm skimmed from a brewery ferment, not the powdered dietary supplement sold under that name today. Two tablespoonfuls of barm is roughly equivalent to 2 teaspoons of active dry yeast or half an ounce of fresh cake yeast.
- WeightsA pound and a half of flour is about 5 1/2 cups; a quarter pound of butter is one stick. Half a pound of oatmeal is about 2 1/2 cups if you use rolled oats, but nearer 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups measured as the cut or ground oatmeal the recipe more likely means. The warm milk is unmeasured — expect somewhere near 1 1/2 to 2 cups depending on how thirsty the oats are.
- Which oatmealIn 1896 "oatmeal" in a bread of this kind meant cut or medium-ground oats, closer to Scottish oatmeal or steel-cut than to modern rolled oats. Rolled oats work but give a flakier, softer crumb; soaking them briefly in part of the warm milk improves the texture either way.
- SaltA saltspoonful is 1/4 teaspoon, which is very light for five and a half cups of flour. Two teaspoons is closer to what a modern palate expects from a bread dough.
- BakingNo method, temperature or time is given: the recipe says only 'when they are cooked', so these may have been oven-baked or cooked on a griddle. If baking, something in the region of 400F for 20 to 25 minutes suits cakes of this size, until they sound hollow and the bottoms are firm. A second rise of 30 to 45 minutes after shaping is worth giving them.
- Yield and serviceThe quantity makes about a dozen cakes the size of a large scone. They are meant to be split, buttered, closed again and sent out hot — a breakfast or tea bread, not a sandwich loaf, and they stale within hours.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, lent his name to a book serving a large hotel breakfast trade, and oat breads of this type are generally traced to Scotland and the north of England, where oats were the everyday grain and yeasted oat cakes were long made with barm from the brewhouse. The recipe's reliance on brewers' yeast dates it: hotels and bakeries commonly drew liquid barm from breweries through the nineteenth century, and compressed cake yeast, commercially available in the United States from the 1870s, displaced it only gradually. The instruction to split, butter and reclose the cakes before serving is a hotel touch he and and the bted and the bread arrives at the table hot, which is the whole point of a bread that goes dry so quickly.