We’ve only got one day to open up the cottage, having stopped along the way to taking my eldest daughter back to college for her summer research session.
There’s so much to be done. We really should clean out the gutters and scrub down the porch and the outdoor furniture.
The stone patio (and I use the word patio loosely) is overgrown; but the weeds are too pretty to pull right now, and gratefully, I let it be.
The herb garden needs weeding and replanting – only the thyme has survived.
But we’re only here for a day, so we just do the bare minimum while the girls sleep in. Mow the lawn, sweep the porch and put out the furniture, wipe down the refrigerator and the open kitchen shelves, sweep the kitchen and dispose of the two dead animals we found outside in the garbage can. (Somehow, it seems there are always dead animals…)
Then, before the day gets too far along, I head back into the kitchen to do what I love most when I am here – bake bread. We’ll serve it at lunch with egg salad made with thyme from the the garden, and sliced tomato and avocado. They’ll be plenty left to pack sandwiches for the road, and I’ll give the second loaf to my daughter to christen her new apartment at school.
Later this afternoon we’ll all head down to the lake for a cold but glorious first swim of the season. We feel so remarkable afterwards that I decide from here on in, we will shall call it “taking the waters”. The girls will sunbathe on the floating dock and Mr TBTAM and I can catch up with the our neighbors and make plans for the rest of the summer. Tonight after dinner, we’ll have S’Mores on the back deck under a crescent moon, then play Boggle before an early bedtime. After all, we’ve got a long drive ahead of us tomorrow.
In a few weeks, we’ll be back again to properly settle in, but this christening has been exactly what the season needed.
Wheat Bread, No.1
This bread recipe comes from Mrs CH Leonard’s Cookbook, circa 1923, a little gem I picked up at last year’s antique fair. This is my first foray into the book, compiled by a woman who, according to the preface –
…may properly be styled as one of those olden times wives and mothers who personally superintends and much of the time actually selects and prepares the food for her family.
This, of course, stands in contrast to myself, who –
…may be properly styled as one of those modern times wives and mothers whose husband usually cooks weeknights and stocks the larder since he works near Fairway and sees a Saturday morning trip to Costco as sacred as completing a mignon, and who pretends she’s a good mother on weekends, when she cooks and posts recipes on her blog to create the impression that she is one of those olden times wives and mothers who… you get the point.
Mrs GH Leonard’s recipes read like recipes your grandmother might give you – rich with detail, but vague as to exact amounts and cooking times. The book also contains medicinal recipes and household cleaning formulas scattered amidst the foodstuffs – the “Antidotes for Poisons” chapter, for example, comes just before “Chafing Dish Recipes.”
I’m reprinting Mrs Leonard’s recipe exactly as written –
Take 3 pints of flour to 1 pint of wetting. The ‘wetting” may be either milk or water or half of each, but must be warmed. It milk is used, scald it and let it cool to a temperature of 75 degrees, or pour boiling water in the milk and let the milk and water cool to the same temperature. The flour should not be so cold as to cool the wetting below 75 degrees. Dissolve one cake compressed yeast in one cup warm water; add this yeast to the wetting; salt to taste; add 1/2 tbsp lard and 1 of sugar and mix with flour in a large bowl or pan in a stiff batter; place the batter on a moulding board and knead to a stiff dough; work in all the flour necessary at this kneading. Some breads require more flour than others. Grease a large bowl or pan, put in the dough, and set in a warm place to rise; also grease the top of the dough. When it has risen sufficiently, knead with as little flour as possible to keep from sticking, form into loaves and put into greased tins, pet it rise and bake. To test the oven, throw a little flour in the oven; if it browns quickly the oven is all right ; if the flour burns the oven is too hot. The fire must be hotter after the bread has been in 10 minutes. An ordinary sized loaf requires 45 minutes for baking. When taken from the oven, brush the loaf over with milk and place where it will cool quickly or near an open window.
I used 1 envelope instant yeast rather than compressed yeast. For “lard” I used olive oil, used 1.5 tbsp salt “to taste”, assumed “1 of sugar” meant 1 tbsp of sugar, and used about a cup of flour for the kneading. Following Mrs Leonard’s method for determining oven temp, I ended up with 400 degrees fahrenheit, which I raised to 425 degrees after 10 minutes of baking.
The bread was delicious – think homemade Wonder Bread, but a little more dense and without the squishiness, meaning that you can’t roll this bread up into a little ball and pop it in your mouth the way you can with Wonder Bread. Sorry. A very nice sandwich bread that should toast beautifully.
