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Swedish Goffee Bread
1/2 teaspoonful salt 15 cardamom seeds 1 yeast cake 2 cupfuls hot milk 3/4 cupful sugar ½ cupful Crisco 2 cupfuls flour Remove seeds from cardamoms and grind fine, add to hot milk with Crisco, sugar, and salt. When lukewarm add yeast cake mixed with a little tepid water and flour. Mix and allow to rise. Then add flour enough to make stiff dough. Knead and let rise again, then make into rolls or loaves. Let rise again and bake in moderate oven till ready. Sufficient for eighteen rolls or two small loaves
A sweet cardamom yeast dough built as a sponge, then stiffened with as much flour as it will take. The ingredient list gives only the starter flour, so expect to add several more cups by feel.
- Flour is open-endedThe two cupfuls listed go into the first soft batter. Working from two cupfuls of milk, expect to add several more cupfuls by feel during kneading, until the dough is stiff but supple.
- The fat quantity looks wrongThe fat quantity looks high -- A cupful and a half of Crisco against two cupfuls of milk makes an unusually rich dough, and may well be a misprint for half a cupful; less fat will give a lighter result.
- Yeast cakeOne cake is about 0.6 oz compressed yeast, equivalent to roughly 2 1/4 teaspoons of active dry or instant yeast. Slake it in a few tablespoons of tepid water, not hot.
- Watch the milk temperatureThe milk is heated to melt the fat and bloom the cardamom, but yeast added above about 110F will be damaged. The instruction to wait until lukewarm is the hinge of the recipe.
- CardamomFifteen pods yield only a small quantity of seeds, well under a teaspoonful; ground fresh in a mortar they are more fragrant than pre-ground cardamom. Buy green pods and discard the husks.
- Moderate ovenUsually taken as somewhere in the region of 350-375F. Rolls take about 15 to 20 minutes, small loaves 30 to 35, until deep gold and reading around 190F at the centre.
- CriscoThe book exists to sell it, but any solid vegetable shortening works. Butter gives a better flavour in a sweet bread, though it carries water, so a straight weight-for-weight swap gives a slightly wetter, less rich dough.
- YieldEighteen rolls or two small loaves, as stated. Braided loaves brushed with egg and strewn with pearl sugar are the usual Swedish finish.
Swedish coffee bread, vetebrod, is the standard accompaniment to the Swedish coffee break, and cardamom is its signature: the spice reached Scandinavia through northern European trade routes and came to be far more embedded in Nordic baking than anywhere else in Europe, though cardamom-scented vetebrod as a mass tradition appears to belong largely to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its appearance in a Crisco promotional cookbook is characteristic of the book's strategy. Procter and Gamble launched Crisco in 1911 and needed to show that a hydrogenated vegetable shortening could stand in for butter and lard across every kind of cooking, including the immigrant home baking that a great many American households were doing at the time. Presenting the recipe in a national cookbook made the case that the new fat belonged in traditional doughs, not only in pie crust.