Swedish Tea Braid With Almonds (1910)

From The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1910

The Story Behind This Recipe

The teacher who measured everything

Fannie Merritt Farmer was supposed to go to college. She was born in Boston on March 23, 1857, and as a teenager she was struck by paralysis, which ended that plan. While she recovered, she cooked for her family and for the boarders they took in, and the kitchen stuck. She enrolled at the Boston Cooking School, which, as the Boston Public Library describes it, trained working-class women to work as cooks and servants in upper- and middle-class homes. She graduated in 1889 and became assistant to the principal, Carrie M. Dearborn. When Dearborn died, Farmer took over as director. In 1902 she opened Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery, which taught housewives, and she lectured to nurses, women’s clubs and the Harvard Medical School.

Her cookbook appeared on January 7, 1896. Her publisher, Little, Brown, doubted it would sell, so Farmer paid for the first 3,000 copies herself. It was an immediate success and made her financially independent. Its big idea was exactness. There were no pinches and no butter ‘the size of an egg,’ only level cups and spoons, and that earned her the title ‘the mother of level measurements.’ The 1910 printing that holds this recipe came out in her final years. Strokes kept her in a wheelchair for the last seven years of her life, yet she kept writing and lecturing until shortly before her death in 1915.

So what makes it Swedish?

Here we have to be straight with you. The sources we could reach don’t say where Farmer found this recipe, why she called it Swedish, or whether Boston families baked it for Christmas. We would rather not invent a backstory. Luckily, the recipe tells a good deal on its own.

This is a patient dough. It begins with a small sponge of yeast, half a cup of milk and half a cup of flour, left to rise. Next comes more milk and a big heap of flour, followed by another rise. Only after that do the butter, sugar, beaten egg, salt and almond extract go in, and then the dough is kneaded and left to rise a third time. The only flavoring is almond. The cook could shape it as a ‘Tea Ring I or II’ or as the Swedish Tea Braid. For the braid, three hand-rolled strands are plaited together, brushed with yolk thinned with cold water and sprinkled with finely chopped blanched almonds.

The little foil-wrapped block

Look closely at ‘1 yeast cake.’ Before commercial yeast came along, American home bakers raised their dough with wild yeast, with starters passed from one baker to another, or with foam skimmed off fermenting beer. Each one rose and tasted a little differently. In the 1860s Charles Fleischmann, who had trained in yeast-making in Europe, joined businessman James Gaff near Cincinnati to mass-produce yeast. They pressed it into cakes, wrapped the cakes in tin foil and sold them fast, often door to door. The moist cakes spoiled quickly.

Home baking boomed in the decades that followed, and refrigerated railway cars carried fresh yeast across the country. A cook working through this recipe in 1910 was baking in the heyday of the yeast cake. That heyday didn’t last. By 1920 store-bought bread was cutting into home baking, and in the 1940s the perishable cakes mostly gave way to dry granular yeast. The rest of the recipe is pure Farmer, with exact cups and teaspoons right up to the last line. That line simply trusts the reader to know a ‘moderate oven’ when she sees one.