Do not constantly make bread in the same shapes: each morning, try to
have some variation. Plain light bread dough may be made into loaves,
rolls, twist, turnovers, light biscuit, etc., and these changes of
shape make a pleasant and appetizing variety in the appearance of the
table. The addition of three eggs to plain light bread dough will
enable you to make French rolls, muffins, or Sally-Lunn of it. As
bread is far more appetizing, baked in pretty shapes, I would suggest
the snow-ball shape for muffins and egg bread. Very pretty iron shapes
(eight or twelve in a group, joined together) may be procured from
almost any tinner.
If you should have indifferent flour of which you cannot get rid, bear
in mind that it will sometimes make excellent beaten biscuit when it
will not make good light bread. In making beaten biscuit, always put
one teaspoonful of salt, a piece of lard the size of an egg, and a
teacup of milk to a quart of flour, adding enough cold water to make a
stiff dough: no other ingredients are admissible. Make the dough much
stiffer than for other breads, beat steadily a half hour, _by the
clock_. Cut with a biscuit cutter or shape by hand, being careful to
have the shape of each alike and perfect. Make them not quite half an
inch thick, as they rise in baking. Do not let them touch each other
in the pan, and let the oven be very hot. It is well not to have
beaten biscuit and light bread baked at the same time, as they require
different degrees of heat. When two kinds of bread are required, try
to have two such as require the same amount of heat. Egg bread and
corn muffins require the same degree of heat as beaten biscuit, while
Sally-Lunn and muffins need the same as light bread.
There is no reason why the poor man should not have as well prepared
and palatable food as the wealthy, for, by care and pains, the finest
bread may be made of the simplest materials, and surely the loving
hands of the poor man's wife and daughter will take as much pains to
make his bread nice and light as hirelings will do for the wealthy.
The mistake generally made by persons in restricted circumstances is
to make too great a use of soda bread, which is not only less
wholesome, but is more expensive than light bread or beaten biscuit,
as it requires more ingredients. The bread, coffee and meat, which
constitute the poor man's breakfast, properly cooked, furnish a meal
fit for a prince.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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