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Rye Bread
May be made as directed for entire wheat bread, using rye flour in place of the whole wheat flour. 1 cup boiling water 1 cup scalded milk 4 tablespoons sugar
This is a cross-reference rather than a standalone formula: the book expects you to turn back to its entire wheat bread and swap the flour. The three lines given are only the liquid and sugar; salt, yeast and the flour quantity come from the parent recipe.
- What is missingAs printed there is no yeast, salt or flour weight. A typical loaf on this scale takes about 1 teaspoon salt, one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) instant yeast, and roughly 5 to 6 cups of flour for the 2 cups of liquid. The original quantity is genuinely unrecoverable from this page alone.
- Do not use all ryeRye has little gluten-forming protein, and a loaf made entirely of it will be dense and gummy in a pan-bread method like this one. Many modern recipes replace no more than half the flour with rye and keep bread flour for the rest.
- Scalded milkScalding was said to neutralise something in raw milk (traditionally described as enzymes, more probably the whey proteins) that weakened dough. Pasteurised milk needs no scalding; simply warm it, combine it with the boiling water, and let the mixture cool to about 110F before the yeast goes in.
- SugarFour tablespoons is a sweet loaf by rye standards and will brown fast. Molasses or dark brown sugar suits rye better and is closer to what the flavour expects.
- Handling the doughRye dough is sticky and slack and never becomes smooth and springy like wheat dough. Resist adding flour to fix the feel; work with oiled hands or a bench scraper instead.
- OvenThe parent recipe's oven instruction is not reproduced here. A loaf of this type bakes at 350 to 375F; bake until the interior reads 200 to 205F, about 40 to 45 minutes for a standard loaf pan.
- CoolingRye continues to set as it cools and slices badly warm. Leave it at least four hours, ideally overnight, before cutting.
- YieldTwo cups of liquid gives two loaves.
Rye was the everyday bread grain of northern and eastern Europe long before it was a specialty item, valued because it tolerates cold, poor, acid soils that will not carry wheat. In American cookbooks of the early twentieth century rye appears mainly as a variation slotted in beside whole wheat and graham, part of a broader interest in "unrefined" flours promoted by domestic-science writers of the period. That the book gives it as a one-line substitution rather than its own formula is telling: rye is treated here as an ordinary loaf with a different flour, not as the sour, long-fermented rye of central European bakeries, whose acidity does the work that gluten cannot. The caraway now associated with deli rye is a separate tradition and goes unmentioned.