Army Bread

This is easier to make than biscuit dough, since there is no grease to rub in, but it takes longer to bake. It keeps fresh longer than yeast bread, does not dry up in a week, nor mould, and is more wholesome than biscuit. It is the only baking-powder bread I know of that is good to eat cold—in fact, it is best that way.

1 quart flour,

1 teaspoonful salt,

1 tablespoonful sugar,

2 heaped teaspoon fuls baking powder.

Mix the dry ingredients thoroughly. Then stir in enough cold water (about 1^ pints) to make a thick batter that will pour out level. Mix rapidly with spoon until smooth, and pour at once into bake-pan. Bake about forty-five minutes, or until no dough adheres to a sliver. Above quantity makes a l 1/2-pound loaf (say 9x5x3 inches).

Breakfast Rolls

1 quart flour,

2 level tablespoonfuls butter, 1 egg,

1 teaspoonful baking powder,

1 pint cold milk (or enough to make a soft dough).

Rub butter and flour well together, add beaten egg, a pinch of salt, and the milk, till a soft dough is mixed. Form into rolls and bake quickly.

Sour-Dough Bread

Mix a pail of batter from plain flour and water, and hang it up in a warm place until the batter sours. Then add salt and soda (not baking powder), thicken with flour to a stiff dough, knead thoroughly, work into small loaves, and place them before the fire to rise. Then bake.

Salt-Rising Bread

This smells to heaven while it is fermenting, but is a welcome change after a long diet of baking-powder breadstuffs. For a baking of two or three loaves take about a pint of moderately warm water (a pleasant heat to the hand) and stir into it as much flour as will make a good batter, not too thick. Add to this one-half teaspoon ful salt, not more. Set the vessel in a pan of moderately warm water, within a little distance of a fire, or in sunlight. The water must not be allowed to cool much below the original heat, more warm water being added to pan as required.

In six to eight hours the whole will be in active fermentation, when the dough must be mixed with it, and as much warm water (milk, if you have it) as you require. Knead the mass till it is tough and does not stick to the board. Make up your loaves, and keep them warmly covered near the fire till they rise. They must be baked as soon as this second rising takes place; for, unless the rising is used immediately on reaching its height, it sinks to rise no more.

To Raise Bread In A Pot

Set the dough to rise over a very few embers, keeping the pot turned as the loaf rises. When equally risen all around, put hot ashes under the pot and upon the lid, taking care that the heat be not top fierce at first.

Lungwort Bread

On the bark of maples, and sometimes of beeches and birches, in the northern woods, there grows a green, broad-leaved lichen variously known as lungwort, liverwort, lung-lichen, and lung-moss, which is an excellent substitute for yeast.. This is an altogether different growth from the plants commonly called lungwort and liverwort—I believe its scientific name is Sticta pulmonacea. This lichen is partly made up of fungus, which does the business of raising dough. Gather a little of it and steep it over night in lukewarm water, set near the embers, but not near enough to get overheated. In the morning, pour off the infusion and mix it with enough flour to make a batter, beating it up with a spoon. Place this "sponge" in a warm can or pail, cover with a cloth, and set it near the fire to work. By evening it will have risen. Leaven your dough with this (saving some of the sponge for a future baking), let the bread rise before the fire that night, and by morning it will be ready to bake.

It takes but little of the original sponge to leaven a large mass of dough (but see that it never freezes), and it can be kept good for months.

Unleavened Bread

Quickly made, wholesome, and good for a change. Keeps like hardtack.

2 1/2, pints flour,

1 tablespoonful salt,

1 tablespoonful sugar.

Mix with water to stiff dough, and knead and pull until lively. Roll out thin as a soda cracker, score with knife, and bake. Unleavened bread that is to be carried for a long time must be mixed with as little water as possible (merely dampened enough to make it adhere), for if any moisture is left in it after baking, it will mould.

To Mix Dough Without A Pan

When bark will peel, use a broad sheet of it (paper birch, basswood, poplar, Cottonwood, slippery elm, etc.). It is easy to mix unleavened dough in the sack of flour itself. Stand the latter horizontally where it can't fall over. Scoop a bowl-shaped depression in top of flour. Keep the right hand moving round while you pour in a little water at a time from a vessel held in the left. Sprinkle a little salt in. When a thick, adhesive dough has formed, lift this out and pat and work it into a round cake about 2 1/2 inches thick.