Woah Nellie!

‘Brown Bread’ jumps off the page and into the oven

by Mary Jo David

Settling in after the holidays, I started looking through the February 1924 issues of old Stockbridge Brief-Sun newspapers to determine what 100-year-old Nellie Maxwell recipe to try this month. As I came across a few recipes that I recalled seeing last year, I got a little perturbed with Nellie for trying to put one over on her readers by repeating recipes just months apart.

Then I realized I was being a little hard on Nellie. At the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal in Virginia, the oldest Nellie column they had on file was in a 1916 issue. That paper continued printing her recipes until Nellie died in 1936—that’s 20 years of Nellie columns! Clearly, she was a standout in her day—not too many women could boast of authoring a syndicated column that ran in newspapers across the country in the early 1900s. And newspapers that ran Nellie’s recipes were probably pulling them from an extensive archive of her columns, so perhaps it was the publishers—not Nellie—who were responsible for repeating recipes just months apart.

Nellie columns were unusually sparse in the February 1924 weekly editions of the Brief-Sun. I really struggled to find a recipe I deemed worthy of making this month. (I think you can forgive me for skipping over Salmon Salad with Coconut!) I was almost desperate enough to try her Puree of Pea Soup recipe (neither my husband nor I eat peas), when I landed on a Brown Bread recipe that looked suspiciously like a recipe that ran in one of last year’s Brief-Sun editions. I didn’t make it then because I couldn’t find graham flour locally. I still couldn’t find the flour, but this time I googled and found that unbleached whole-wheat flour is an acceptable substitute for graham flour.

Now I was ready to bake!

To her credit, Nellie’s “Brown Bread” recipe (see clipping in sidebar) provided the necessary quantity for each of the ingredients. Since I’m only baking for two, and I don’t like to waste ingredients if the recipe is a flop, I decided to cut the recipe in half. To make the sour milk, I simply added a tablespoon of white vinegar to regular milk and let it sit for a little while.

It’s always tough to cut a single egg in half, but for that I use my handy-dandy little OXO Good Grips Mini 2-ounce measuring cup. Once I whisk the egg in the cup, the ounce-and-tablespoon markings on the sides help me measure out half of the egg.

The rest of the recipe assembly was without incident until I had to determine what size bread pan to use. Nellie’s recipe called for “pans” (plural) and mentioned leaving plenty of room for the bread to rise. Since I was only making a half recipe, I decided to go with two 8-by-4 inch loaf pans, and, as it happened, I probably could have gotten away with one pan. Nellie does not mention greasing the pans, but as an experienced baker, I decided I would not only grease them, but also line the bottoms with waxed paper to guard against the bread sticking to the bottom of the pan.

My biggest beef with Nellie’s “Brown Bread” recipe is that she didn’t specify an oven temperature. Usually, she gives us something to go on, maybe specifying a “hot oven” or a “moderate oven,” but this month we got nada—no temperature suggestion at all. I decided to go with a moderate 350-degree oven.

Warning: This recipe bakes up much faster than the hour and a half that Nellie suggested. Within 25 minutes, I was taking the bread pans out of the oven, and I daresay even at a lower oven temperature or using a single, bigger pan, I would never have baked this for an hour and a half. If I had, I’d still be airing my house out from the smell of burned bread!

Having made brown breads in the past, I know they run the gamut from super sweet to barely sweet. I knew this one was going to be barely sweet, so I took the liberty of adding a tablespoon of brown sugar to the batter before filling the second pan.

The final product was tasty, if just slightly drier than I would have liked it. I probably should have cut the baking time to 20-22 minutes. During the taste test, it was the loaf with the additional brown sugar that appealed to us more, but that goes without saying since my husband has a sweet tooth the size of Texas!

Current photos by Mary Jo David.