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Rolled Oats Bread
2 cupfuls boiling water 2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful rolled oats ½ cupful molasses 2 teaspoonfuls salt 1½ yeast cake ½ cupful lukewarm water Flour Add boiling water to oats and allow to stand one hour; add molasses, salt, Crisco, yeast cake dissolved in lukewarm water, and flour to make Breads, etc. stiff dough; knead well, let rise, knead a very little, divide into two Criscoed bread pans, let rise again and bake forty minutes in moderate oven. Sufficient for two small loaves.
A straightforward molasses-and-oatmeal yeast bread from Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbook. The only real gaps are the flour quantity and the yeast, both of which need translating.
- Yeast cakeA yeast cake here is a small block of compressed fresh yeast, commonly around ⅗ oz, though cake sizes varied; it is usually treated as equivalent to one 2¼-teaspoon packet of active dry. One and a half cakes is about 1 tablespoon of active dry or instant yeast; dissolve dry yeast in the lukewarm water as written, or stir instant yeast straight into the flour.
- Flour is unmeasuredThe original simply says "flour to make stiff dough." There is 3½ cups of liquid in total plus the molasses, but 2 cups of it is taken up by the soaked oats, and the recipe yields only two small loaves, so expect appreciably less flour than the liquid total alone would suggest. Add it a cup at a time and treat the dough's feel, not a number, as the guide.
- Soak the oats fullyThe hour-long soak in boiling water is the hinge. It gelatinizes the oats so they hold moisture in the crumb rather than drawing it out of the dough; skipping it gives a dry, crumbly loaf. Use old-fashioned rolled oats, not instant.
- Let the mixture coolAdd the dissolved yeast only after the oat mixture has come down to lukewarm. Molasses and hot oatmeal together stay warm longer than you would think, and liquid much above 130F begins to kill yeast; aim for about 105-115F when dissolving.
- CriscoTwo tablespoons of any solid vegetable shortening works, as does butter or a neutral oil. "Criscoed bread pans" means greased; two 8x4 inch loaf pans suit the stated yield of two small loaves.
- Moderate oven350F. Forty minutes is reasonable for small loaves, but molasses browns fast, so judge doneness by an internal temperature near 195F rather than by crust color.
- Rising timesThe recipe gives none, so you must judge by the dough. Note that 1½ yeast cakes is a generous quantity for this amount of dough, so the rises may be brisk despite the molasses and oats.
"The Story of Crisco" (1913), compiled by Marion Harris Neil, was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a wholly new product: a shortening made from cottonseed oil hardened by hydrogenation, introduced in 1911. Many of the recipes in the book appear to be existing household standards with Crisco written into them, and this is a clear example — oatmeal-and-molasses bread was long established in New England and the Maritimes, where oats were cheap and molasses arrived by the barrel from the West Indies trade. The original would have used butter, lard or drippings; here two tablespoons of Crisco stand in, which was the whole point of the volume. The text itself heads the loaf "Breads, etc."