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Quick Bran Bread
2 cups bran 3 cups whole wheat flour 1¼ cups bread flour 1/4 cup Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 3/4 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking soda 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 egg tablespo 2 tablespoons Mazola 3/4 cup Karo, Blue Label 2¼ cups milk Combine the dry ingredients, add the Karo, milk and the egg, beaten. Pour into two medium-sized bread pans oiled with Mazola. Let stand twenty minutes and bake forty-five minutes in a moderate oven, 350 to 375 degrees F.
A soda-and-baking-powder quick loaf from a corn-products promotional booklet, so the branded ingredients are doing double duty as advertising. It behaves like a modern bran bread batter: mixed, rested, baked.
- The fractionsRead the flour as 1 1/4 cups bread flour and the milk as 2 1/4 cups. The proportions only balance at those amounts; 11 and 21 cups would be a different scale of baking entirely.
- Karo, Blue LabelKaro was sold in several colour-coded grades in this period; which grade Blue Label denoted is not something the booklet tells us. Light corn syrup is the safe modern stand-in; dark corn syrup will give a much stronger molasses note.
- MazolaCorn oil, then as now. Any neutral vegetable oil works. Note that the mixing directions list only Karo, milk and egg going into the dry ingredients, so add the 2 tablespoons of oil with the liquids and reserve a little for greasing the pans.
- Cornstarch in breadThe quarter cup of cornstarch would dilute the protein of the whole wheat and bran and so soften the crumb, though in a corn-products booklet its presence is also advertising. Omitting it will give a denser loaf.
- BranUse unprocessed wheat bran, the loose flaky kind sold in bulk or in health-food aisles, not bran breakfast cereal, which is already sweetened and formed.
- The twenty-minute restBran absorbs liquid slowly, and the rest lets it hydrate so the loaf is moist rather than gritty. Chemical leaveners do lose some lift while standing.
- Pans and oven"Medium-sized bread pans" is not defined here; a standard loaf tin of roughly 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 to 9 x 5 inches is the reasonable reading. Bake at 350F for a moister loaf, 375F for a firmer crust; a skewer should come out clean at about 45 minutes.
- Yield and keepingYield -- Two loaves. Corn syrup keeps the crumb soft, and the loaves toast well.
Booklets like this one were published by manufacturers rather than cooks: Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch, Mazola oil and Karo syrup were all products of the American corn-milling industry, and the recipes exist to put those brands into a housewife's everyday baking. Bran bread fits the moment. From the 1910s onward bran was promoted as a corrective to refined white flour, and by the 1920s it appeared in advertising as a health food in its own right. The recipe also shows the quick-bread method at full confidence: no yeast, no kneading, no proofing beyond a twenty-minute stand, a style that spread once commercial baking powder and soda were cheap and standardised.