First things first: For almost 20 years now, I’ve been working on projects to document the lives of my grandparents so that the current, and yet-to-be-born generations of my family will have a record of them. I started by recording them telling stories of their life together. After they both passed, I transcribed all of the letters that they wrote to each other (mostly during his service in WWII), then I moved on to a volume of all the poetry my grandfather wrote. Now, I’m working on a family cookbook, filled with all the recipes that my grandmother used. I’m getting near the end of the first phase of this particular project—just transcribing the recipes—so the next phase will include proofreading and some light editing while I also start making some (but not nearly all) of the recipes so that I can take photos of the finished products to include in the cookbook. This is one of those recipes.
A caveat before we get started: My grandmother, being a product of her time, learned all of her domestic skills through hands-on learning from her mother and her older sisters. This means there wasn’t much in the way of actual, written directions for her to follow, which means that when she got older and had a family of her own, she just did things mostly from memory. When it came to her recipe box, most of the recipes that she wrote down were just lists of ingredients without any directions at all because she didn’t need them. The only recipes that actually came with instructions were those which she obtained from friends and other family members. As a former professional baker, I have the good fortune to recognize that most baked goods follow a basic formula so it’s not that hard for me to intuit how to write down the instructions for those recipes (for the other dishes I did the best I could and then sent off drafts to my aunts to get their feedback). This recipe is very similar to one that I used to make all the time at a small family bakery, so it was a good one from which to start.
Here’s what you’ll need:
5 – 5 ½ Cups Flour
2 Packages Dry Yeast
3 oz. Package Egg Custard Mix (or substitute Vanilla Pudding Mix if you can’t find Custard Mix, which is what I did here)
2 tsp. Salt
½ Cup Water
1 Cup Milk
¼ Cup Butter
2 Eggs
4 Tbs. Softened Butter
½ Cup Sugar
4 tsp. Cinnamon
In a large mixing bowl using a dough hook, sift together 2 cups flour, the custard mix, and salt. Add the dry yeast and mix well.
In a sauce pan, heat water, milk and ¼ cup of butter until warm. You don’t want the mixture to get too hot because it will kill the yeast. So, if your milk is steaming but your butter isn’t melted yet, just turn off the heat and keep stirring over the still-warm burner until the butter melts completely. Add the warm liquid to the flour mixture and beat in the 2 eggs for one minute at low speed. Stop the mixer and scrape the bowl so the dry flour comes down off the sides of the bowl and the bottom of the bowl. Scraping the bowl is critical when making almost any baked good because dry flour has an almost magical ability to stay dry no matter how many wet ingredients you use or how fast you run the mixer.
After you’ve scraped the bowl, beat for three more minutes at medium speed. Turn the mixer down to low and stir in the remaining flour to make a firm and only slightly sticky dough. Depending on how humid it is where you are and other environmental factors, you may not need to use all of the remaining 3 ½ cups of flour. I used about 3 ¼. If you stick your finger into the dough, only a little should stick to you when removing your finger. If a glob of dough sticks to you, then add more flour.
Turn dough out onto a floured surface and knead for a few minutes. Place dough in a greased bowl and cover with a damp cloth to rise for an hour. Some people cover their rising dough with plastic wrap. Those people are idiots. The plastic wrap not only fails to keep the surface of the dough from drying out, but it also tends to grab the dough and take some with it when you pull it off. You don’t need a “wet” cloth, only a “damp” one.
While your dough is rising, mix the sugar and cinnamon together in a separate bowl until the cinnamon is well distributed. This is also a good time to grease two loaf pans.
Punch down the dough and divide into two pieces. Use a floured rolling pin to roll out each piece of dough into a 14×7 inch rectangle. This may require a bit of grabbing the corners and stretching them out to get that rectangular shape.
Spread two tablespoons of the softened butter onto the flattened dough pieces. Use half of the cinnamon sugar mix to spread evenly over the buttered surface of the dough pieces.
Roll up both pieces from the short side and place in greased loaf pans, seam side down. Cover with your damp cloth and allow to rise for one hour.
Bake in a preheated 375-degree oven for 35-40 minutes. While loaves are cooling in the pans, brush the tops with the remaining two tablespoons of softened butter and the remainder of the cinnamon sugar. Shake the loaves in their pans from side to side a little bit so more of the cinnamon sugar sticks to the butter. When butter on top sets, remove loaves from pans and set on a rack to cool.
You know, and I know, that there is nothing in this world like warm bread of any type. So, before the bread cools completely, cut a slice or two and spread a little butter on top. Then moan with ecstasy upon eating.
This also makes an excellent French toast. I know because I made some with it. Glorious.
I’ve only made non-yeast quick breads and baked goods. Your before and after rising photos are incredibly helpful. When there is no reference point, recipes that say double in size or whatever are less than helpful. This looks delicious. You win FYCE!
Mmmm this looks so good. I’ll be honest, it’s probably more work than I’m willing to put in, but I would eat the hell out of it. Hmm, maybe I should send this recipe to my brother in law who likes to do this sort of thing…
The recipe aside, which is fab, this is a fascinating personal (second-hand) culinary social history for this amateur food historian. Do you happen to know if your grandmother only wrote down the ingredients because she would call in the ingredients to the local grocer and they’d send the delivery boy to deliver them? Before the rise of the postwar supermarket this was extremely common, apparently, because the women didn’t drive, the men couldn’t be trusted with a grocery list, and besides the men took the family car (if they had one) to work with them. There’s even a fairly famous “I Love Lucy” episode from the early–mid-50s where Lucy and Ethel, to earn a little “pin money” for themselves, become proto-DoorDash people, picking up groceries for their neighbors. Though it was filmed in Culver City at the Desilu Studios, it was set in Manhattan and geared toward the entire American audience. It was fantastically successful, so millions of Americans must not have found this strange. The episode is famous because for some reason they have to bake bread, I can’t remember why, to fulfill an order maybe, and a loaf many feet long pops out of the oven. It used to be on the rerun promotional highlight reel because it is a classic slapstick routine.
Because I am a very strange fellow and probably a tad too food- and social history like this-obsessed, one of my favorite scenes from “Mad Men” occurs when Betty is in the local supermarket. “Mad Men” was notoriously obsessive about getting historical details correct so you’re actually in a recreated suburban supermarket circa 1961, I think. That wasn’t the point, the real plot action could have taken place anywhere somewhat public, but they went for it. It’s no wonder that show had a stratospheric production budget.
Similarly, if you’ve ever seen the docu-series that is credited with being the first reality TV series, “An American Family,” the mother is shown shopping in a supermarket in Santa Barbara circa 1971. This was really pointless filler, I bet, when it was filmed and broadcast, but to me it’s fascinating, everything about that show was fascinating to me, but it took a terrible toll on the Loud family, the subjects.
I also came across news footage of a Royal, I think it might have been a young QEII herself, touring a new British supermarket and the narrator explaining what it was and what it offered. This was probably in the 1950s, once WWII (which ended in 1945) food rationing was finally ended years after the war.
Whenever Better Half and I travel abroad I insist that one of the first stops be to the equivalent of a supermarket. Most tourists don’t do this, but we have a very restricted travel program: We normally only go to places where I have a fighting chance to speak the language, and it’s a good refresher on what different food is called, and when we see it on a subsequent menu I don’t need to ask for an English menu, not that one is usually available at these out-of-the-way cheap, locals-only nooks I always manage to find. “While you’re jabbering away at your new best friend, the server, can you order me something that’s beef with maybe something with a vegetable side?” “I certainly can. Here. It says that it’s…”
Thanks for reading my Ted talk (do “Ted Talks” still exist?)
I’m not aware of the mechanics of how groceries were supplied, although I do know that the local Kohl’s (yes, before they sold out to Batus to create a nationwide department store chain, the Kohl family started in the grocery store business) was a walkable distance away, so not sure if they utilized a delivery service or not (aside from the milk which was delivered). Some of the recipe cards are really old. I liken this to Artusi’s “Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well”–he didn’t bother with specifics in terms of instructions because the assumption was that the people using his cookbook were already familiar enough with most food preparation situations that they didn’t need step-by-step instructions.
I only made it a handful of episodes into Mad Men before deciding they cared way more about historically accurate sets and costumes than they did about an entertaining plot.
That is a more than fair point. The plots actually did get kind of tedious. They’d introduce a promising storyline but it would be brief in one episode and never spoken of again. Meanwhile some would just drag on. I hope this isn’t a spoiler:
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So at one point Megan and Don separate and she goes off to Hollywood to pursue a modeling/acting career. She rents a place in the Hills and Don comes out for a visit. She throws a party and (basically) Charles Manson (!) shows up. The character is a young, handsome musician and he brings along some friends/groupies. “Oh God, is this how they kill off Megan?” Nope. The party, its aftermath really, takes a turn for the strange but the Manson character is not part of it and is never seen nor mentioned again.
I feel like that story is such a great illustration of the show as a whole! The writers didn’t think “how can we make an interesting Charles Manson plot” but instead “hey wasn’t Manson in Hollywood at this time? Let’s stick him in there.”
If I recall correctly, this was also your assessment of Asshole Abbey, which is validation that I shouldn’t bother watching Mad Men.
And you would be correct! But in both series the costumes and settings are worth it.
The thing about Downton Abbey, though, is that if you were a gregarious Anglophile drunkard, like me, you could occasionally arrange viewing parties. Feed your company something vaguely “British” to set the mood and then settle everyone in. Have LOTS of wine on hand. Whenever someone exchanges a wordless, meaningful glance, take a sip of wine. Often, several characters do this, like the announcement of the beginning of WWI, so that’s why you only take a sip each time. When someone, primarily Carson, wordlessly arches an eyebrow, take a sip. This also happens a lot. During a dinner scene, whether it be upstairs or downstairs (and it is a total rip-off of “Upstairs/Downstairs”) people will raise their voices or bicker or trade quips, that’s fine. But when they do something physical, like slam down a teacup or a dinner fork, take a gulp. (Full disclosure: I got this inspiration from a British news source, probably The Guardian.)
For the more abstemious: Take a gulp whenever Cousin Violet/Grandmama is shocked/horrified by some modern invention, like indoor electric lighting or a telephone. This is actually kind of rare, but delightful when it happens, because the actor is Maggie Smith, after all.
Haha your viewing parties sound fun. I actually stuck with Downton for a couple of seasons, but I’m way more of a sucker for that time period than the 60s.
@butcherbakertoiletrymaker I’ve been looking for a good cinnamon bread recipe, thanks! I’m not sure I understand the addition of pudding, though. Can you elaborate?
Thanks, again!
It’s not pudding, per se, it’s the dry pudding mix. I needed to use it as a substitute for the custard mix because I couldn’t find any of that.