Home › Pastries › Raisin and Buttermilk Bread
Raisin and Buttermilk Bread
4 cupfuls flour 5 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful soda 2 teaspoonfuls cream of tartar 3 tablespoonfuls sugar ½ eggs Buttermilk to make soft dough 1 cupful sultana raisins Sift flour, salt, soda and cream of tartar into basin, rub in Crisco fine, add sugar, raisins, eggs well beaten, and sufficient buttermilk to make soft dough. Make into smooth mound, roll out, divide into four pieces, lay on greased tin and bake in moderate oven twenty-five minutes. Sufficient to make four small loaves.
A soda-raised buttermilk loaf, closer to Irish soda bread or a large fruit scone than to a yeasted bread. The dough comes together in minutes and should go into the oven immediately.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. The loaves are small and shallow, so 25 minutes is realistic; check for a hollow sound and a dry skewer.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, still sold under the same name though reformulated over the years to reduce trans fats. Five tablespoons rubbed into four cups of flour is a lean, biscuit-like proportion; butter or lard works the same way if you prefer.
- Soda and cream of tartarOne teaspoon soda plus two teaspoons cream of tartar is homemade baking powder, and it starts working the moment the buttermilk goes in. Mix, shape and bake without pause or the loaves will be flat.
- Buttermilk quantityThe recipe gives none. Expect roughly 1 to 1 1/4 cups with two eggs already in the bowl, added a little at a time until the dough just holds together. It should be soft and slightly tacky, not pourable.
- "Basin" and "greased tin"A basin is simply a mixing bowl. The tin is a greased baking sheet, not a loaf pan; these are free-form rounds.
- "Roll out"Do not roll thin. Pat the dough to about an inch thick, cut into four, and shape each piece into a round. Handle it as little as possible.
- SultanasGolden raisins. Any raisin works; if they are very dry, plump them briefly in warm water and pat them dry so they do not draw moisture from the crumb.
- The stray lineThe "1 cupful sugar" printed after the method appears to be a typesetting overrun, most likely the opening ingredient of the following recipe. Use only the three tablespoons called for in the ingredient list.
- YieldFour small loaves, as the recipe states. Best the day they are made; soda breads stale quickly.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913 to introduce American cooks to a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens: cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation into a white, shelf-stable solid. The book's job was to prove that the new product could do everything butter, lard and suet did, which is why its recipes range so widely. This particular loaf is not an American invention; buttermilk breads leavened with soda and cream of tartar spread through Britain and Ireland from roughly the 1840s onward, and sultanas in a soda dough is a familiar teatime formula. Its presence here suggests no special affinity between shortening and soda bread.