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Coffee Bread
3/4 cupful milk. ½ cupful melted Crisco 1½ cake compressed yeast 1 teaspoonful salt 2 eggs 1 cupful sugar 1 teaspoonful lemon extract ¼ cupful chopped English walnut meats Flour Heat milk slightly, then add flour to make batter and yeast dissolved in little lukewarm water. Allow to rise until light, then add Crisco, eggs Breads, etc. well beaten, sugar, lemon, salt, and enough flour to make stiff dough. Knead ten minutes and let rise until light. Place in Criscoed pan and let rise again. Spread with melted Crisco and sprinkle with sugar, cinnamon and nuts. Bake in hot oven half an hour.
Sufficient for one large loaf.
A sponge-method sweet yeast bread from Procter & Gamble's 1913 Crisco promotional cookbook, written in the era's shorthand: two of the main ingredients have no quantities at all, and the cook is expected to know what a batter and a stiff dough feel like.
- The missing milk and flourThe ingredient list gives neither. For one large loaf, work from about 1 cup of warm milk and 4 to 4½ cups of flour total, adding roughly a third of the flour to the milk for the sponge and the rest after the eggs and fat go in. Judge by feel: the finished dough should be soft but not sticky.
- The Crisco quantity is suspectA cup and a half of melted fat against one cup of sugar and two eggs is richer than most comparable sweet doughs of the period, and a misprinted fraction is a plausible explanation. Half a cup is in line with the rest of the formula; treat the printed figure with caution rather than as a target.
- Compressed yeastA cake of compressed yeast ran about 0.6 oz, so 1½ cakes is roughly an ounce of fresh yeast. Substitute about 1½ packets (3½ teaspoons) of active dry yeast, dissolved in the lukewarm water as directed. That is a heavy dose by modern standards and will move quickly in a warm kitchen.
- Hot ovenUsually taken to mean somewhere around 400–425°F. Thirty minutes suits a loaf pan; a flatter coffee-cake pan will be done in 20 to 25. The sugar-and-nut topping browns before the crumb sets, so tent with foil if it darkens early.
- Three rises, not twoThe sponge rises, the kneaded dough rises, then the shaped dough rises in the pan. Skipping the middle rise gives a coarse, bready crumb. "Until light" means roughly doubled and visibly domed.
- Topping the loafBrush with melted shortening (or butter, which tastes better here) and scatter sugar, cinnamon and walnuts after the final rise, working gently so the risen dough does not deflate. No cinnamon quantity is given; a teaspoon mixed into two tablespoons of sugar is about right.
- Lemon extractA teaspoon of extract in one loaf is assertive by current taste. The zest of a lemon, or half the extract, sits better alongside the cinnamon.
- Crisco versus butterThe shortening is here because the book is an advertisement. Butter at the same weight gives better flavour and a slightly less tender crumb; nothing in the method depends on the fat being solid at room temperature, since it is melted first.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after the launch of the product itself, with recipes credited to Marion Harris Neil; every dish in it exists to demonstrate that hydrogenated cottonseed oil could stand in for butter, lard and suet. Coffee bread is the English name for the sweet, lightly enriched yeast loaf that German and Scandinavian households in America ate with morning or afternoon coffee — kaffebröd, or the sugar-and-cinnamon-topped cakes of Pennsylvania and the Midwest. Its appearance in this book is strategic: sweet doughs were exactly the territory where cooks trusted butter most, and a cottonseed shortening that was cheap, shelf-stable and neither meat nor dairy had an obvious case to make. The same neutrality earned Crisco its early endorsement as a pareve fat in kosher kitchens, a marketing line P&G pursued from the beginning.