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Steamed Nut Bread
½ pint graham flour 1/3 cupful Crisco ½ cupful white flour 1 cupful chopped English walnut meats ½ teaspoonful salt 2 teaspoonfuls baking powder 1 cupful milk 1 cupful sugar 1 egg Cream Crisco and sugar together, add egg well beaten, milk, salt, flours, baking powder, and nuts. Mix and turn into Criscoed mold, cover with greased paper and steam two hours. This nut bread is delicious served hot with butter. It may be served as a pudding with cream or liquid sauce. Sufficient for one loaf.
A steamed quick bread from Procter & Gamble's Crisco promotional cookbook, closer in method to Boston brown bread than to anything baked. Two points matter most: the flour is measured by volume in old units, and the batter as written is very stiff.
- The flour measurements1½ pint of graham flour is 3 cups; with the 1½ cups of white flour that is 4½ cups of flour to 1 cup of milk. That ratio gives a paste rather than a batter. Expect to add milk a few tablespoons at a time until it drops thickly from the spoon.
- Graham flourCoarse whole-wheat flour, stone-ground and including the bran and germ. Modern whole-wheat flour works; a coarse or "graham" grind if you can find it is nearer the original and drinks up more liquid.
- CriscoThe 1912 product was hydrogenated cottonseed oil, solid at room temperature. Current all-vegetable shortening behaves the same way in creaming; unsalted butter also works and tastes better, though the crumb will be slightly less tender.
- The moldA 1-lb coffee tin, a pudding basin, or a straight-sided 6-cup metal mold. Grease it well, fill no more than two thirds, and cover with greased parchment tied down so condensation cannot drip into the loaf.
- Setting up the steamerStand the mold on a rack or folded cloth in a deep pot, add boiling water to come halfway up the sides, and keep it at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates; if the pot runs dry the mold scorches and the bread stops rising.
- Two hours is right, but testSteamed breads take far longer than baked ones because the batter never exceeds 212F. At two hours a skewer should come out clean and the loaf should feel springy. If it is still wet in the center, cover and steam another 20 minutes.
- Baking powder in a long steamThe lift comes early, so get the batter into the mold and into the steam without delay. Mix the dry ingredients into the creamed base only until combined; overworking a whole-wheat batter makes it tough.
- Yield and servingOne loaf, roughly 10 to 12 slices. It is dense and moist and slices best after 10 minutes' rest out of the mold; hot with butter as directed, or cold the next day, toasted.
This comes from The Story of Crisco, the recipe booklet Procter & Gamble issued to introduce its new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening to American cooks after 1911, which is why the fat is named in the ingredient list and the mold is "Criscoed" rather than greased. The dish itself is older than the product: steamed breads were long-standing New England practice, a way to make a loaf in a kettle on the stovetop rather than heating a whole oven, and Boston brown bread is the best-known survivor of the habit. The graham flour points to another nineteenth-century thread, the whole-grain baking associated with the Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, whose name stuck to coarse unsifted wheat flour long after his dietary reform movement faded. English walnuts, then the standard grocery walnut as distinct from the native American black walnut, mark this as a company-kitchen recipe aimed at the middle-class housewife rather than a farmhouse one.