Recipes

Here we’ve gathered holiday breads printed between 1796 and 1920, each copied exactly as printed and linked to a full page with its history. The range is wide: a Christmas stollen from a 1919 kosher cookbook, saffron buns topped with sugared caraway comfits, a Moravian sugar cake packed with butter and cinnamon, an 1887 Election Cake heavy with raisins, Fannie Farmer’s Parker House rolls, an Appalachian salt-rising bread, a brioche twisted into a crown, beaten biscuits struck a hundred times, and a rusk from America’s first cookbook.

In 1889 a Swiss-born cook who had spent more than two decades in Delmonico’s kitchens wrote down how New York’s grandest restaurant made its baba, and printed it for home cooks. It is not the little rum-soaked cake most of us picture. It is a tall, buttery centerpiece with Madeira in the dough and candied fruit scattered across the plate.

Ella Eaton Kellogg’s recipe for date bread runs just four sentences. In that space she combines coarse Graham flour from the health-reform movement, a pint of sponge from the ordinary home bread routine, and a cupful of dates that had come all the way from the Middle East. Each of those ingredients carries a story about how Americans ate in the 1890s.

A cup of orange juice, warmed to exactly 80 degrees, goes into a plain white dough. By evening there are three loaves on the counter: one with raisins, one with almonds and one left alone. Mrs. Wilson printed this bread in Philadelphia in 1920, a continent away from the groves, and she used the oranges as if they were nothing special. By then, they weren’t.

Twelve muffins, seven ingredients, two minutes of beating and twenty minutes in the oven. That is the whole recipe, printed in New York in 1917 by authors who never stopped to explain where the rise would come from. They didn’t need to, and the reason they didn’t is a story about chemistry, bribery and the end of waiting all night for bread.

Amelia Simmons gave her rusk just a few lines, and she wasted none of them: four pounds of flour, a pint of milk, a pint of something called emptins, and an oven hot enough to finish the job in ten minutes. Those lines come from the first known cookbook written by an American. They hold a surprising amount of 1790s kitchen life: homemade yeast, flour weighed by the pound, and a cook who judged her oven by feel.

In 1920 a Philadelphia cookbook explained how to make sticky buns without a single egg or a pat of butter. The recipe gives the temperature of the milk to the exact degree, then sends the pan into “a moderate oven” with no number at all. Those small quirks say a good deal about how a city kitchen ran a century ago.

Five ingredients, one brand name, one patented gadget and a pan of hissing-hot gem cups: Elizabeth O. Hiller’s popovers pack a lot into a few lines. They were printed in 1913 in a cookbook published by a shortening company, at a time when American cooks were learning to measure milk down to the eighth of a cup but were still left to judge the oven for themselves.

What’s been called the first Creole cookbook ever printed was put together by a newspaperman who left his name off the cover. Tucked among the famous dishes of 1880s New Orleans is a loaf so plain it almost hides: flour, mashed potato, a cup of yeast, and a closing line that makes the butter optional because the bread “is nice without.”

Mary Randolph’s batter bread fits in a single sentence: wheat flour and corn meal, four eggs, some rich milk and a row of little tin moulds. That sentence comes from the book usually called the first regional American cookbook, still being printed in 1860, more than thirty years after its author died. It is also an early relative of the soft Southern dish we now call spoon bread.

There is no yeast in this loaf, no butter, and no name attached to it. What it does have is eight teaspoonfuls of baking powder, a large cup of chopped walnuts and a twenty-minute rest, all set down in the 1916 edition of a Cincinnati cookbook. It is a modest recipe with a surprising amount of history tucked inside.

A hundred blows of a mallet, and not a pinch of baking powder. That is the whole secret of this 1913 Southern biscuit, which rises on nothing but air pounded into a stiff dough of flour, lard, salt and ice water. Even its author, Martha McCulloch-Williams, labeled it ‘Old Style,’ as if she were catching it on its way out the door.

In 1915, a Pittsburgh cookbook sold with a slogan that was also an argument: “The Best Cooks Are Suffragists.” Tucked among its recipes is a short one that turns a cup of ordinary bread dough into small almond-crusted rings and calls them “Swedish Wreathes.” It takes five short sentences to tell, and those five sentences carry a Norse word, a political campaign and a household that baked its own bread.

Most Sally Lunns take their time, rising slowly on yeast the way a proper English teacake should. This one, from an 1859 Boston household manual, skips the yeast entirely and comes out of the oven in about twenty minutes. It catches a moment when American home cooks were learning to make bread rise with a spoonful of soda and a little cream of tartar.

In early New England, Election Day came with a party, and the party came with cake. Not a frosted layer cake, but a heavy, spiced, raisin-packed loaf raised on yeast, a recipe already more than a century old when Fanny Gillette printed this compact version in 1887. Her recipe has one curious omission, and it happens to be the flour.

In 1910 a Boston cook could pull a golden three-strand braid from the oven, glossy with egg yolk and scattered with chopped almonds. The recipe comes from Fannie Merritt Farmer, the woman who taught America to level off its measuring cups, and nearly every line of it carries the habits of her kitchen.

Most bread recipes begin with yeast. This one begins with a cup of scalded milk, some cornmeal and a night spent somewhere warm, waiting for the mixture to go sour on purpose. Printed in 1908 under the name of a contributor at a Virginia fort, it carries an old Appalachian way of baking without bought yeast, and then, in its final step, asks for half a cup of yeast anyway.

Most recipes end with a serving suggestion. Eliza Leslie ended this one with a warning: “do not attempt it unless you have excellent yeast.” Behind that stern line sits a buttery, cinnamon-soaked cake often traced back to Bohemia, which came to America with the Moravians and turned up in a Philadelphia cookbook in 1840.