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Health Bread
2 cupfuls flour. 3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 2 cupfuls whole wheat flour 2 cupfuls bran 1 teaspoonful salt ½ cupful sugar 1 egg 2 cupfuls milk 1 cupful molasses 1 cupful stoned chopped dates 2 teaspoonfuls baking soda ½ cupful hot water Mix flours and bran together, add Crisco, salt, sugar, egg well beaten, milk, molasses, soda dissolved in boiling water, and dates. Mix well together and turn into two Criscoed and floured tins and bake in moderate oven one and a quarter hours. This bread is excellent for constipation. Sufficient for two loaves.
A molasses-and-bran batter bread from Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook, closer to a quick bread than anything requiring kneading. A few of its instructions need translating, and the printed text has a flaw.
- Stray line at the endThe trailing "3 eggs ½ cupful sugar" does not belong to this recipe; it appears to be the opening of the following one, carried over in the printed text. Ignore it: this bread uses one egg.
- Moderate ovenRead as 350F. A loaf this wet and this heavily molassesed will darken early, so check at 45 minutes and tent loosely with foil if the tops are already deep brown.
- The hinge: work fast once the soda goes inTwo teaspoons of baking soda dissolved in boiling water and dropped into an acidic molasses batter starts reacting immediately. Have the tins greased and floured before you mix, and get the loaves into a preheated oven without delay.
- BranPlain wheat bran, the loose miller's bran sold in health-food aisles, not bran breakfast cereal. Cereal flakes are already sweetened and will throw the sugar and liquid off.
- "Criscoed" tinsSimply greased with shortening, then dusted with flour. Two standard 9x5-inch loaf pans hold this quantity; the batter should come no more than two-thirds up the sides.
- Sugar quantity is ambiguousSugar quantity -- the text reads "1½ cupful sugar", one and a half cups, on top of a full cup of molasses. That is what the recipe literally says; cooks who find it very sweet may prefer to reduce it.
- Consistency and donenessWith two cups of milk, a cup of molasses and a cup and a half of hot water, this is a pourable batter, not a dough. Test with a skewer in the centre and expect a moist, dense, dark crumb rather than a springy one.
- Dates"Stoned" means pitted. Chop them and toss with a spoonful of the measured flour so they do not sink to the bottom of the loaf.
- Yield and keepingTwo loaves, roughly 12 slices each. Bran breads of this type are often better on the second day, and suit thin slices with butter.
This comes from The Story of Crisco, the recipe book Procter & Gamble commissioned to teach American cooks what to do with hydrogenated vegetable shortening after Crisco was introduced in 1911; the recipes were credited to Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. The frank note that the bread "is excellent for constipation" places it squarely in the bran enthusiasm of the era, when wheat bran had been promoted for a generation by sanitarium dietetics and the breakfast-cereal industry that grew out of it, and when a laxative claim on a loaf of bread was a selling point rather than an embarrassment. The dates, molasses and whole wheat also reflect a period habit of making a health food palatable by loading it with sweetness — a loaf with a cup of molasses in it was still, by the standards of 1913 advertising, a virtuous one.