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Crisco Milk Bread
3 tablespoonfuls sugar 3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 tablespoonfuls salt 1 yeast cake 1 quart milk About 7 pints flour Mix yeast cake with 1 tablespoonful sugar. Heat milk, add remainder of sugar, Crisco, and salt. Cool and add yeast and flour to make stiff dough. Turn out on floured baking board, cut in three pieces, knead first one piece then others stretching dough; let rise over night or in warm temperature five hours. Knead lightly and divide into Criscoed pans. Allow to rise and bake in moderate oven one hour. From same dough , French bread, breadsticks, horse shoe rolls and French rolls can be made. Sufficient for three loaves.
A straightforward enriched white loaf from Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook, written when flour was measured by the pint and shortening was the novelty being sold. The proportions are sound; the timings and the yeast need translating.
- Flour by volumeSeven pints is 14 cups, roughly 3 3/4 lb or 1,700 g of all-purpose flour. Treat it as a ceiling rather than a target: add flour until the dough is stiff but still tacky, since a quart of milk will absorb somewhat less than 14 cups in a modern kitchen.
- The yeast cakeA yeast cake of this period was usually a compressed fresh cake, commonly around 0.6 oz, though sizes varied by maker. Substitute one packet (2 1/4 teaspoons) of active dry or instant yeast. The instruction to "mix yeast cake with 1 tablespoonful sugar" is the old way of creaming fresh yeast to a liquid; with dry yeast, simply stir it into the cooled milk.
- Cool the milk properlyThis is the hinge. Milk heated for scalding must come down to about 105-110F before the yeast goes in; hotter and the yeast dies, and with a quart of liquid the pan holds its heat far longer than you expect. Use a thermometer.
- SaltTwo tablespoons reads alarmingly, but against 14 cups of flour it is about 2 percent by weight, which is normal for bread. Do not scale it down without scaling the flour down too.
- Crisco, then and nowThe 1913 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil; today's is a soybean and palm blend, reformulated in 2007 to remove trans fats. Three tablespoons melted into a quart of milk is a light enrichment, and any neutral solid shortening or an equal amount of melted butter behaves the same way here.
- Oven temperatureThe book says only "moderate oven", conventionally taken as 350-375F. One hour is long for standard 9x5 loaf pans; start checking at around 40 minutes and judge by an internal temperature of 190-200F and a hollow sound when the base is tapped.
- The overnight riseFive hours in a warm room or overnight at room temperature reflects slower, cooler kitchens and a smaller yeast population. With modern yeast, an overnight bulk fermentation should go in the refrigerator or the dough will overproof and collapse; at room temperature, watch for doubled volume rather than the clock.
- YieldThree loaves, as stated, which is a lot of bread from one mixing. Halving the whole recipe works cleanly and gives two smaller loaves or one loaf plus a tray of rolls.
The Story of Crisco was published in 1913, two years after Procter & Gamble introduced hydrogenated cottonseed shortening, and its 615 recipes were written by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The book's job was to persuade cooks that a manufactured fat could stand in for lard and butter in everything they already made, which is why an ordinary milk bread appears with the brand name worked into both the ingredients and the pans. Enriched white loaves like this one were a domestic staple in the era before commercial bakery bread dominated American tables, and the recipe closes with a note that the same dough yields French bread, breadsticks and horseshoe rolls. Crisco was also marketed heavily as a neutral, vegetable-based fat suitable for kosher kitchens.