Home › Bread and Bread Mixtures › Seventh
Seventh
Knead again, shaping into loaves; divide dough into as many portions as there are cups of liquid in the mixture. Place in pans, if a dark crust is desired, brush over with skimmed milk or melted fat. Eighth. Cover and let rise in a warm place to double their bulk. Ninth. The baking is as important as the mixing of bread. The temperature of the oven depends somewhat upon the size of the loaves. If your stove does not contain an oven thermometer, test the oven by spreading one teaspoonful of flour one-quarter of an inch thick on the lid of a jelly glass, and allow it to remain for 5 minutes in the oven. If the flour becomes golden brown, the temperature of the oven is between 400 and 425°F.
Ten minutes after the baking begins, the heat should be decreased gradually. The time for baking bread is usually divided into quarters. The first quarter, the bread rises; the second quarter, it begins to brown; the third quarter, it finishes browning; and the fourth quarter, the baking is completed and the bread shrinks from the pan. Bake loaves from 50 to 60 minutes.
Tenth. Cool loaves on a rack or place them so the air can circulate freely around the loaf. 1 cup scalded milk 1 cup boiling water 2 tablespoons fat
This is the tail end of a straight white-bread method — the shaping, proofing and baking steps, with the liquid quantities tacked on at the end. The instructions are sound; the oven guidance is the part written for a stove nobody owns any more.
- Read the flour test as 425°FRead the flour test as 400–425°F -- The teaspoon of flour spread on a jelly-glass lid is a workable proxy for an oven with no thermometer: golden in five minutes means roughly 400–425°F, as the book states. Set a modern oven within that range, then reduce the heat after the first ten minutes; the book says only "decreased gradually" and gives no second figure.
- Number of loaves"As many portions as there are cups of liquid" means two loaves from the 1 cup milk plus 1 cup water given here — modest loaves suited to standard 8½ x 4½-inch pans.
- Scalding the milkScalding was generally held to inactivate enzymes and organisms in raw milk thought to weaken gluten and interfere with the yeast. Pasteurized milk needs none of this; warm it to blood heat and combine with the water so the mixture is around 105–110°F before the yeast goes in.
- The missing quantitiesThe fragment gives only liquid and fat. A dough on 2 cups of liquid takes roughly 6 to 6½ cups of bread flour, 2 teaspoons salt, 1–2 tablespoons sugar and one packet of instant or active dry yeast.
- Brushing for a dark crustSkimmed milk or melted fat brushed on before the final rise gives the dark crust the book offers it for. Milk browns faster because of its sugars; leave the loaf bare for a paler, crisper top.
- Judging donenessThe quarters described — rise, browning, finish browning, shrink from the pan — still hold, but an instant-read thermometer settles it: a lean loaf is done at 190–200°F in the centre. Fifty to sixty minutes is right for two loaves of this size.
- CoolingThe instruction to cool on a rack is not decorative. Steam trapped under a loaf left in its pan condenses and softens the bottom crust within minutes. Turn loaves out as soon as they come from the oven and slice only once they are near room temperature.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was issued by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and given away by the million to policyholders through its visiting-nurse and welfare programmes; its purpose was as much public health as pleasure, which is why the bread chapter reads like a lesson rather than a recipe. That numbered, step-by-step structure — first, second, third, down to tenth — belongs to the domestic-science movement of the early twentieth century, when cooking was being reorganised as a teachable technical subject with measurable results. The flour-on-a-jelly-glass-lid oven test is the clearest sign of the era: oven thermometers existed and are mentioned in passing, but the book assumes a reader whose stove does not contain one.