I used to assume that quick breads, such as banana bread or
zucchini bread,
 had always been around. What better way for a busy housewife of
old, whether in the colonies or on the wagon trail west, to have
something warm and substantial to put on the table for her
family?
I used to assume that quick breads, such as banana bread or zucchini bread, had always been around. What better way for a busy housewife of old, whether in the colonies or on the wagon trail west, to have something warm and substantial to put on the table for her family?
And if there happened to be a couple of sad bananas lying around, what could be more thrifty than incorporating them in a fragrant loaf for the family’s tea?
As I thought about it some more, I realized that first of all, colonial mums probably had never even seen a banana, wouldn’t eat one if offered and certainly wouldn’t think of incorporating it into bread.
More fundamentally, as I looked for history of quick breads, including not only loaf breads but biscuits and muffins, I realized that what makes these items “quick” is the use of a leavening other than yeast, so no time is required to allow the dough to rise before baking.
And yet baking powder as we know it was not developed until the 19th century. I found the date of 1859 as the year when Eben Horsford formulated and patented Rumford Baking Powder, a brand still available today. For some time before this, people had used their own formulas of cream of tartar and bicarbonate of soda. The Rumford formula was more reliable and is based on calcium acid phosphate, thought to be healthier than cream of tartar.
You may be wondering why Horsford named it “Rumford” baking powder instead of Horsford. At the time he took out the patent, Eben was the Rumford Professor of the Application of Science to the Useful Arts at Harvard, a professorship that had been endowed by Count Rumford in 1814. Perhaps he concocted the formula on their time and felt he had to give them the credit. Not only is the Rumford brand of baking products still available, the professorship still exists and is now part of Harvard’s physics department.
Before the use of these chemical agents, breads were leavened by yeast, often made at home from by-products of the beer-brewing process, or simply by allowing a mixture of flour and water to ferment, much like today’s sourdough. Sweet cakes gained their loft through lengthy beating, either of the entire mixture or of the egg whites separately before inclusion.
I found one recipe for “gingerbread” from the 1300s, but this turned out to be the gingerbread-man kind of gingerbread, at the time made in a flat wooden mold and containing no leavening. The cake-like gingerbread that we think of as a holiday treat didn’t come along until later.
My investigation of the whole subject of quick breads actually started with carrot cake. After being served delicious carrot cake at a party, I thought it would be a great way to use up some of the five pounds of carrots I had bought in a moment of misguided thrift but that weren’t getting munched as quickly as I expected.
But on further reflection, I remembered that carrot cake is known for its treacherous richness – it seems it should be healthful because of the carrots, but many of the other ingredients make it a very indulgent dessert. And that’s before we even get to the cream cheese frosting.
Besides, I was not ready to commit to squeezing little frosting carrots out of a tube.
So I searched the Web for “Carrot Bread” and came up with the following recipe. Once I got the batter mixed up, I couldn’t find the loaf pan, so I baked it in a 9-inch-by-13-inch pan. The result was tasty “Carrot Bars,” a testimony to this recipe’s flexibility and forgiving nature.
