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Fifth
Sift the flour, allowing 3 to 4 cups for each cup of liquid. Add of the flour to the liquid mixture and beat thoroughly. Add more flour to make a dough, using a knife, until when touched with the finger, the dough does not stick to the finger. A bread mixer is a time and labor saver. Turn dough onto a slightly floured board; knead by pushing the dough into the palms of the hands and drawing it forward with the fingers. Use as little flour as possible on board and hands while kneading. Continue until the dough is smooth and elastic to the touch. It takes from 15 to 20 minutes to knead with the hands and about 3 minutes in the bread mixer. Thorough kneading makes fine grained bread.
This is the kneading step of a multi-part bread lesson rather than a standalone recipe, and most of what needs translating is the flour ratio and the kneading time.
- The ratioThree to four cups of flour per cup of liquid covers a wide span, somewhere around 50 to 65 percent hydration by weight depending on where in that range you land — firm sandwich-loaf territory. The breadth is probably there because flours varied in absorption; weigh instead, at about 300 g liquid to 500 g bread flour, and adjust by feel.
- Text dropped from the originalThe second sentence reads "Add of the flour" — a word or fraction appears to have fallen out in printing. The sense is to beat part of the flour, plausibly about half, into the liquid to make a batter, then work in the rest.
- Kneading timeFifteen to twenty minutes by hand is longer than most modern doughs need; today's flour is more consistent from bag to bag. Eight to ten minutes of steady work will usually bring a dough to the smooth, elastic state described.
- The bread mixerThis means a lidded metal pail with a crank-driven dough hook, clamped to the table — a device widely sold to households around 1900, not an electric mixer. A stand mixer with a dough hook does comparable work in roughly five to seven minutes on low, rather than the three claimed here.
- How to know when it is done"Smooth and elastic to the touch" is sound but vague. Stretch a piece thin enough to see light through it without tearing; if it tears, keep going.
- Use as little flour as possibleThis is the instruction that matters. Every extra handful worked in at the board stage stiffens the loaf and dries the crumb. A dough scraper and lightly oiled hands do more than added flour.
- "Fine grained bread"The stated goal is a tight, even crumb suitable for slicing and toasting, not the open irregular hole structure prized in artisan loaves today. Long kneading and a firm dough are how you get it, so judge the result against that intention.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given free to policyholders, part of a broad early twentieth-century campaign in which insurers took on public health education — nutrition, sanitation, infant care — on the reasoning that healthier customers lived longer. That explains the schoolroom structure here: bread making broken into numbered steps, First through however many, in the style of the domestic science movement then reshaping American home cooking around measurement and method rather than inherited habit. The "bread mixer" mentioned in passing dates the text usefully; hand-cranked dough pails were sold to households in this period, and the page's own comparison of three minutes' work with twenty suggests why they appealed.