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Breakfast Straws
1/2 teaspoonful soda 1/4 teaspoonful salt If 1 cup of thick sour 1/2 teaspoonful cinnamilk mon cup dried currants teaspoonful soda + teaspoonful salt About 2 cups flour, and enough more to roll
The page as scanned has collapsed two printed columns into one line, so the ingredient list is scrambled and no method survives. What can be read is a plain sour-milk dough, rolled and cut into strips; treat the notes below as a guide to reading the fragment rather than a working recipe.
- Untangling the listRead it as: 1 cup thick sour milk, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, [?] cup dried currants, [?] teaspoonful soda, [?] teaspoonful salt, about 2 cups flour plus enough more to roll. The quantity before "cup dried currants" and the fractions on the soda and salt are lost in the scan; the soda and salt may have been half-teaspoons.
- No method is printedNothing on the page says whether the straws were baked or fried, or at what heat, nor how thick the dough was rolled. Any thickness or cooking method suggested for them is a guess from the name, not from the text.
- Sour milk and soda"Thick sour milk" is naturally clabbered raw milk, which today's pasteurised milk will not reproduce. Buttermilk is the standard substitute, cup for cup; its acid is what activates the soda, so the two must not be separated or the dough will taste of soda.
- Soda quantityIf the illegible fraction was in fact a full teaspoon of soda to one cup of sour milk, that is on the high side by modern practice, where about half a teaspoon per cup of buttermilk is usual; the scan does not settle the point. Excess soda leaves a soapy, faintly metallic edge and yellows the crumb.
- "Enough more to roll"The flour is deliberately open-ended because sour milk varied in thickness. Add flour only until the dough stops sticking to the board; more than that gives a hard, dry straw rather than a crisp one.
- CurrantsDried currants here are the small dried Zante grape, not fresh red or black currants. If yours are hard, they are worth plumping in warm water for ten minutes and patting dry before they go into the dough.
Breakfast "straws" and "sticks" belong to a family of narrow, crisp quick breads that ran through American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, when sour milk and saleratus gave a cook leavening without yeast or waiting. Left-over cookery books of this kind were a genre in their own right around the turn of the twentieth century, when domestic-science writers treated waste as a moral as well as a household failing, and a chapter on stale bread was expected to earn its keep. The scanned page shows the other side of that publishing boom: cheaply set, two-column ingredient lists which now defeat the machines that read them.