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Gluten Bread
2 cupfuls scalded milk. 2 cupfuls boiling water 2 teaspoonfuls salt 1 egg 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/4 cupful warm water 1½ yeast cake 3 cupfuls gluten flour Mix Crisco, boiling water, milk, and salt. When lukewarm, add yeast cake dissolved in warm water, egg well beaten, and gluten. Let rise, Breads, etc. when risen and spongy beat well, add enough gluten to make a stiff dough and knead well. Allow to rise, shape in loaves, place in Criscoed bread pans, let rise, and bake for one hour in moderately hot oven. Sufficient for two small loaves. 1 cupful flour
A plain yeast dough written in the compressed shorthand of 1913, with a couple of transcription oddities that need sorting out before you start.
- The ingredient list does not match the methodThe method calls for milk, but no milk appears in the list; a stray "1 cupful flour" hangs at the end, probably the tail of the next recipe. Treat the liquid as 2 cups boiling water, and add gluten flour by feel at the second mixing until the dough is stiff, as the method directs.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake was compressed fresh yeast, commonly around 0.6 oz though sizes varied. One and a half cakes is roughly 1 oz fresh, or about 2½ to 3 teaspoons of instant dry yeast. Dissolve dry yeast in the quarter cup of warm water as written.
- Wait for lukewarmThe boiling water is there to melt the Crisco and scald the mixture. Adding yeast or beaten egg before it drops to about 105F will kill the one and scramble the other.
- Gluten flourPeriod gluten flour was wheat flour with much of the starch washed out, generally higher in protein than today's bread flour, though commercial products varied widely in quality. Modern vital wheat gluten is not a substitute at these proportions; a high-protein bread flour with a few tablespoons of vital wheat gluten stirred in comes closest.
- Moderately hot ovenAround 375-400F. A full hour at that heat suits two small loaves in metal pans; pull them at an internal temperature of about 200F rather than trusting the clock.
- Crisco and Criscoed pansAny solid vegetable shortening works, as does butter. "Criscoed" simply means greased.
- TextureHigh-gluten dough tightens fast. Knead well, then let it relax fully at each rise, or the loaves will be dense and the crumb tough.
- YieldTwo small loaves, as stated; small loaf pans, on the order of 8 by 4 inches, will suit.
Gluten bread had a specific purpose in the years before insulin: it was among the breads commonly allowed to diabetics, whose diets were managed by cutting starch as far as the patient could bear. Flour with the starch washed out was sold by pharmacies and specialty grocers, and recipes for it turn up in general cookbooks throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco, a 1913 promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble to promote its hydrogenated vegetable shortening, is characteristic of that book's ambitions: it set out to show Crisco replacing butter and lard in every corner of the kitchen. The claim made for Crisco in such contexts was digestibility, an argument then applied loosely to a great many foods and not one that would be made in the same terms now.