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Swedish Rye Bread
2 tablespoonfuls sugar 3 tablespoonfuls Crisco 2 teaspoonfuls salt 1 yeast cake 3 cupfuls rye flour 1 cupful white flour 4 cupfuls boiling water In evening add Crisco, sugar, and salt to boiling water; cool, add yeast cake mixed with a little tepid water or sugar, rye flour and white flour. Allow to rise and in morning add more white flour, a little at a time, to make a stiff dough. Let rise, knead again and bake in Criscoed pie tins or cake tins as it will rise better than if baked in bread tins. Bake in hot oven half hour. When taken out of oven brush crust with a little melted Crisco.
Sufficient for four loaves.
A long overnight rye sponge that finishes as a stiff dough in the morning. The published quantities are only the sponge — most of the flour is added the next day and never measured.
- The flour is deliberately incompleteFour cups of boiling water against four cups of flour gives a batter, not a dough; that is the intended overnight sponge. The recipe leaves the morning flour unmeasured, and it will take several more cups of white flour, worked in a little at a time, to reach a stiff, kneadable dough.
- Cool the liquid properlyThe hinge of the recipe. The scalded, fat-enriched water must come down to about 100-110F before the yeast goes in, or the yeast is killed and nothing rises overnight. Overnight sponges also do better in a cool room, around 65F, than on a warm counter.
- Yeast cakeA period yeast cake is a small block of compressed fresh yeast, commonly around half to two-thirds of an ounce, though sizes varied. Substitute one 2 1/4 teaspoon packet of active dry or instant yeast. The instruction to mix it with "a little tepid water or sugar" simply means slaking it to a smooth cream first.
- CriscoIntroduced in 1911 as hydrogenated cottonseed oil, so this is a shortening. Any solid vegetable shortening works; lard substitutes closely, and butter will work but adds water and milk solids along with the flavor. "Criscoed" tins means greased.
- Rye flourUse medium rye. Dark or whole rye makes a heavier, stickier dough and will need more white flour to become manageable; light rye behaves closest to what the book assumes.
- Hot ovenRoughly 400-450F. Half an hour suits the shallow pie-tin loaves specified; by modern practice, check for an internal temperature near 200F, since rye stays moist and can read as underbaked by touch alone.
- Why pie tinsThe recipe says only that the dough will rise better in pie or cake tins than in bread tins. Rye has little gluten, and the likely reason is that a shallow round tin supports a dough with poor structure, giving flatter, wider loaves with more crust.
- The crust brushMelted shortening on the hot loaf softens the crust as it cools. Do it immediately out of the oven; once the loaf has set the fat just sits on the surface.
- YieldFour flat round loaves. Rye of this kind slices best the day after baking and keeps several days wrapped in cloth.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil to teach American cooks what to do with a product nobody had needed before: Procter & Gamble's hydrogenated cottonseed oil, launched in 1911 as a substitute for both butter and lard. The book worked by taking familiar household recipes and rewriting them with Crisco in place of whatever fat they had always used, which is why a Scandinavian immigrant bread turns up in a shortening manual. Swedish rye in the American Midwest descends from limpa and its relatives, the sweetened rye loaves of Swedish home baking, usually flavored with caraway, fennel, anise or orange peel and often molasses; this version has been stripped back to sugar alone. The overnight sponge, set after supper and finished before breakfast, is often said to have been common practice in an era when bread was baked at home several times a week.