[Gutenberg 58621] • War-Time Breads and Cakes

This cookbook was published in 1918.

From the book's Foreword:

For the last twenty years the housewives

of our country have been more and more de-

pending upon the bakers for the bread used

in the homes. In some of our cities the home-

baked loaf is hardly known.

Although the commercial bread has been

of great variety and of excellent quality, it

has never been an economical method of

serving the family with the staff of life.

By depending upon ready-baked bread we

have come to consider it a difficult process to

make good yeast bread and almost a hard-

ship to try to have home-made bread.

I had fallen into the habit of buying my

bread; my family was so small that it hardly

seemed necessary to insist that bread should

be made in my kitchen when good bread

could be bought at a reasonable price. The

result was that when the call came to con-

serve the wheat, I resorted almost entirely

to quick breads made with baking powder or

with sour milk and soda. However, the ex-

periments that I made with these materials

proved so interesting and satisfactory that

I decided to see what I could do with a yeast-

cake and other grains than wheat.

My first experiments were failures and I

was discouraged because, instead of saving

food, I was wasting it, and yet I was unwill-

ing to acknowledge myself defeated by the

little square of leaven that came to me so

attractively done up in tinfoil.

After careful consideration I decided that

I had rushed into undue intimacy with a force

of which I had very little understanding and

that I might do better if I cultivated the ac-

quaintance by degrees.

My next experiments were made with a

very simple sponge of whole wheat flour,

water, and yeast, which I allowed to rise for

about four hours. I divided it into four parts,

and to one I added scalded corn meal and

rye flour; to the second, raw corn meal and

whole wheat flour; to the third, barley flour

and rye; and to the fourth, rice flour. I put

salt in each lot, but no sugar or shortening.

As I worked I kept a paper and pencil beside

me and made careful notes of everything I

did, also of results that I expected and of any

doubts that occurred to me as to the wisdom

of what I was doing. The four little loaves

that resulted taught me many things and

were the beginning of experiments that

lasted through the summer experiments

that any housekeeper could make, for I had

no laboratory, only the kitchen of my coun-

try house and the utensils found in every

house.

In giving the results of my summer's work I

have tried to make the recipes so simple and

yet explicit that the most inexperienced cook

can follow them.

AMY LlTTLEFIELD HANDY

Barnstable, Massachusetts