Cookbook Lady’s White Wheat Bread

Hello, again History Lovers!

In my post from a week ago “Cooking With Ida” we were guided through the process of making homemade yeast bread–an essential task for rural farm women in the 1920s. My husband’s mother, born in 1925, was an avid bread baker as well while raising her family of seven children from the 1950s through the 1970s. My husband recalls her baking four loaves of bread twice a week. She even ground her own wheat. Happily, for her, it was an electric grinder. She made homemade bread sandwiches every school day for the kids’ lunches. My husband’s favorite snack was an inch thick slice of bread spread generously with butter and honey.

My mother on the other hand was a recreational bread baker. For her, it was a creative and therapeutic experience not done on a regular basis. We loved it when the mood would strike and we would come home from school to the smell of freshly baked bread. We would thickly spread each slice with home-canned apricot jam.

Although baking bread has been a creative outlet for me as well, I did it with some regularity. When my six children were at home I would bake four large loaves a week or two loaves and a batch of cinnamon rolls. Posted below is my tried and true recipe of thirty-five years.

There are several differences between my bread recipe and the recipes of my mother and mother-in-law with the most noticeable being that I baked my bread in rustic round or oval loaves as opposed to baking it in traditional bread pans (that was the creative part). The other difference was the type of wheat flour that I used. A friend introduced me to hard white wheat (as opposed to hard red wheat that is most commonly used). At that time a home baker would have to search for a mailorder source for the white wheat which would then need to be ground into flour. It was worth the effort though as it produced a milder tasting lighter loaf of bread with nutrition equal to that of hard red wheat. Luckily for home bakers of today, King Arthur Flour offers white wheat flour on their website HERE. They also offer SAF Instant Yeast HERE which is recommended for homemade yeast bread not made in a bread machine. Recipe and photos below:

Enjoy!