Homemade Bread Intro Recipe

Homemade bread is healthier, satisfies hunger better, and is cheaper

than bakers' bread. Make bread yourself if you possibly can. Use

"middlings" if you can possibly get them; they contain the best elements

of wheat. "Household Flour" has similar qualities, but is sometimes made

from inferior kinds of wheat. Both are darker and cheaper than fine

white flour; and bread made from them takes longer to "rise" than that

made from fine flour. Bakers' bread is generally made from poor flour

mixed with a little of the better sort; or with a little alum, which

added to the wheat grown in wet seasons, keeps the bread from being

pasty and poor in taste.



The prices of bakers' bread upon the streets in the eastern and western

parts of the city are as follows: ordinary white bread, five cent loaf

weighs three quarters of a pound: six cent loaf weighs fourteen ounces:

eight cent loaf weighs one pound and ten ounces; black bread, two eight

cent loaves weigh, respectively, one pound eight, and one pound ten

ounces; fine French bread, eight cent loaf weighs three quarters of a

pound; in the French quarter a six cent loaf weighs one pound. We advise

the purchase of new flour in preference to old, because, unless flour is

cooled and dried before it is packed, the combined action of heat and

dampness destroys its gluten, and turns it sour; gluten is the nutritive

part of the flour, that which makes it absorb water, and yield more

bread. If you do not have a good oven, your bread can be baked at the

baker's for about a cent a loaf. When bread is made too light it is

tasteless, and lacks nourishment, because the decay caused in the

elements of the flour used to make it by the great quantity of yeast

employed, destroys the most nutritious parts of it. A pint of milk in a

batch of four loaves of bread gives you a pound more bread of better

quality, and helps to make it moist. Scalded skim milk will go as far as

fresh whole milk, and you can use the cream for some other dish. One

pound of pea-meal, or ground split-peas, added to every fourteen pounds

of flour used for bread increases its nourishment, and helps to satisfy

hunger.



Keep your bread in a covered earthen jar; when it is too stale to eat,

or make into bread broth, dry it in a cool oven, or over the top of the

fire, roll it with a rolling-pin, sift it through a sieve, and save the

finest crumbs to roll fish or chops in for frying, and the largest for

puddings. If a whole loaf is stale put it into a tight tin can, and

either steam it, or put it into a moderately warm oven for half an hour;

it will then be as good as fresh bread to the taste, and a great deal

more healthy.



A good allowance of bread each day is as follows: for a man two pounds,

costing six cents; for boys and women one pound and a half, costing five

cents; for children a pound each, costing three cents.

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