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Entire Wheat Bread
1¼ cupfuls boiling water 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1¼ cupfuls milk 2 teaspoonfuls salt 2 tablespoonfuls sugar 1 yeast cake 1/4 cupful tepid water Whole wheat flour Mix boiling water, milk, sugar, salt, and Crisco together. Add yeast cake dissolved in tepid water, with 3½ cupfuls whole wheat flour. Mix and let stand until light. Add more flour until soft dough is formed, then knead and divide into two loaves. Place in Criscoed tins and let stand until the dough doubles its bulk. Brush over with milk and bake in moderate oven one and a half hours.
Sufficient for two small loaves.
A straightforward yeasted whole wheat loaf from Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbook. The printed measurements have suffered in transcription, so read the quantities with care before you begin.
- The broken fractions"1/4 cupfuls boiling water" and "1/4 cupfuls milk" are probably 1 1/4 cupfuls each, a leading 1 having dropped out; the plural "cupfuls" points that way, since the tepid water is given as the singular "1/4 cupful." "31/½ cupfuls" of flour is presumably 3 1/2. That gives about 2 1/2 cupfuls of scalded liquid, plus the 1/4 cupful used for the yeast, against 3 1/2 cupfuls of whole wheat flour -- a very slack sponge, which is consistent with the instruction to work in more flour afterwards. The reading is a reconstruction, so adjust by feel.
- The yeast cakeA compressed yeast cake of this period was commonly about 0.6 oz, usually reckoned equivalent to one modern packet of active dry yeast (about 2 1/4 teaspoons), though cake sizes varied. Dissolve it in the tepid water -- comfortably warm, not hot -- and not in the hot mixture.
- Scald and coolThe boiling water scalds the milk it is mixed with. Whatever the intention, the mixture must come down to lukewarm before the dissolved yeast goes in, or the yeast will be killed.
- CriscoStill sold, and the recipe exists to sell it. Any neutral solid or liquid fat works — 2 tablespoons of butter, lard or oil behave the same in this quantity.
- "Criscoed tins"Greased loaf pans. Two small loaves means roughly 8 x 4 inch tins; a single 9 x 5 will also take the whole batch, with a longer bake.
- Moderate oven350F. Whole wheat browns fast, so tent with foil if the crust colours before the interior sets.
- The baking time is too longNinety minutes at 350F will dry out two small loaves badly. Modern practice is 35 to 45 minutes, judged by an internal temperature of 195-205F rather than the clock.
- Two risings"Let stand until light" is the sponge stage — expect an hour or so. The second rise, to doubled bulk in the tins, takes another 45 to 60 minutes; whole wheat is slower and rises less than white.
- Milk washBrushing with milk gives a soft, matte, well-browned crust rather than the gloss of an egg wash. Apply just before the loaves go in.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was one of the earliest and most effective examples of a food company publishing a cookbook to create demand for a product that had no culinary tradition behind it. Crisco, introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911, was hydrogenated cottonseed oil — a shortening that was neither butter nor lard, and that housewives had no reason to buy until they were given several hundred recipes calling for it by name. Entire wheat bread is a period term for what is now called whole wheat: flour milled from the entire grain rather than sifted to remove bran and germ. It carried a distinct moral flavour in the early twentieth century, promoted by health reformers as more wholesome than the white bread that industrial roller milling had made cheap and universal. Placing it in a shortening cookbook does double duty: the loaf is virtuous, and the tins are Criscoed.