In honor of National Dessert Month (which everyone celebrates, right?), we’ll be posting recipes from the RBMSCL’s collection every Friday this month. Last Friday—The Devil’s Tale’s first birthday—we started the celebration with a recipe for a pretty pink birthday cake.
Today’s recipe comes from an advertising brochure with a marvelous title: How to Make Bread (But Not in This Disagreeable Old-Fashioned Way). Really, we’re not making that up:
You see, this brochure advises the smart homemaker to purchase The Universal Three Minute Bread Maker from Landers, Frary & Clark (of New Britain, Connecticut). The transformation is nothing short of astonishing:
And, of course, no advertisement for an absolutely revolutionary bit of kitchen gadgetry would be complete without a few recipes to make with said gadgetry. So, in honor of a certain approaching first Tuesday in November, we offer this fine recipe:
Loaf, or Election Cake
Put into the Bread Maker one and one-half cups milk, one cup potato yeast, one cup sugar, five cups flour, turn crank three minutes, put on cover and raise till light. When light, add one cup shortening, (half butter and lard), one cup sugar, whites of two eggs, nutmeg to season, turn crank five minutes, cover and raise again till light. Fill pans with batter and fruit (raisins or citron, or both), well floured alternately, until pans are two-thirds full, add also fruit on top.
The cake should stand in the pans about one-half hour and then be baked in a moderate oven.
Now we’re off to eBay to find a 100-year-old Universal Three Minute Bread Maker.
Seems like we need a recipe for devil's food cake on The Devil's Tale… Which collection did this come from?
We do, indeed! I'm in search of one for next week–since it'll be two days before Halloween! The pamphlet's title (above) is linked to its library catalog record, so you'll be able to easily discover its location (on site at the RBMSCL), as well as several other details about the pamphlet. It was acquired as part of the collections of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture.
Could you please do a great big favor for those of us who own Universal bread makers and post some nice big scans of all the pages of your little booklet? It would be so nice to see the recipes and how they were presented back when these machines were first being sold and to know how the manufacturer instructed owners to use the machine. Many thanks if you can help. 🙂
Good news, Wyatt! We think we should be able to have this pamphlet digitized on our Scribe scanner and made publicly available online at the Internet Archive.
The process usually takes a few weeks. A link to the digitized pamphlet should be sent directly to the e-mail you provided once it’s available, and we’ll also post the link here.
The scans are finished! You’ll find a complete copy of the pamphlet online at http://archive.org/details/howtomakebreadbu00sall.