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Raisin Bread
3½ cups flour 4½ teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg 1 tablespoon fat 1½ cups milk 1 cup chopped raisins cup sugar (or less) Sift the dry ingredients, reserving a little flour. Add milk, egg and melted fat, beating mixture thoroughly. Sift flour over chopped raisins and stir into mixture. Place in greased bread pan and let stand for 20 minutes. Bake in moderate oven 350°F. 45 minutes to 1 hour. Chopped dates, or figs, may be substituted for raisins. 1 cup cornmeal 1 cup rye flour 1 cup graham flour
A plain baking-powder quick bread of the sort that filled the gap between yeast baking days. The method is sound as written; a few of the quantities need interpreting.
- The missing sugar quantityThe line reads "cup sugar (or less)," with the fraction lost in printing. For a loaf of this size ½ cup is a sensible reading, and the parenthesis indicates the amount was treated as adjustable downward.
- The stray grain listThe three lines at the end — cornmeal, rye flour, graham flour — appear to be stranded by the typesetting; they most likely indicate that one cup of any of them may replace one cup of the white flour, though the page does not say so. Graham flour is coarse whole-wheat; a whole-wheat flour stands in directly.
- Fat"1 tablespoon fat" meant lard, drippings or butter, whichever was at hand. Melted butter or a neutral oil behaves the same here. One tablespoon in three and a half cups of flour makes for a lean, fast-staling loaf — it is best eaten the day it is baked, or toasted after.
- Flouring the raisinsReserving a little of the measured flour to toss over the chopped fruit is the point of the step, not an extra addition. It keeps the raisins suspended rather than sunk, and it matters more in a batter this loose.
- The 20-minute restLetting the batter stand in the pan gives the baking powder time to begin working and the flour to hydrate. With modern double-acting baking powder there is still plenty of lift left for the oven, so the rest does no harm.
- Pan and donenessA "bread pan" here is a standard loaf tin, roughly 9 by 5 inches. Start checking at 45 minutes: a skewer should come out clean and the loaf should sound hollow when tapped out of the tin.
- YieldOne loaf, about 12 to 14 slices. Cool it fully before cutting — quick breads with fruit crumble badly while warm.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was not sold but given away: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed it to policyholders for decades, alongside pamphlets on nutrition, hygiene and infant care, as part of a welfare-and-education programme that the company believed would keep its insured population alive longer. That purpose shows in a recipe like this one. It is cheap, it uses a single egg and one tablespoon of fat, it leans on baking powder rather than yeast, and it offers cornmeal, rye and graham flour as swaps for white flour at a time when public-health writers were pressing the case for whole grains. Raisins were the standard sweetener-and-fruit of the American pantry, shelf-stable and shipped east from California in quantity, and the recipe notes that dates or figs may be substituted.