It’s fun to bring treats to meetings and gatherings with friends. I enjoy making new “old” recipes, and attendees are captive audiences for testing the foods I make. One day last week I needed to make snacks for a coffee group in the morning, and for the November meeting of the garden club in the evening. I found a hundred-year-old recipe for Orange Bread that sounded very flexible. The recipe said that the bread could be baked in a round pan (and implicitly it suggested that the bread could also be baked in the typical rectangular pans), and that the bread mixture could be put in muffin pans. It called for using orange marmalade to provide the sweetness and the orange flavor.
I made this recipe three times. Once to see how Orange Bread turned out (it was excellent); and, two more times to get enough bread and muffins for the coffee group and garden club meeting. Since the recipe said it could be made in a variety of ways, I made a round loaf, small rectangular loaves, regular-sized muffins, and small muffins.
The Orange Bread and Muffins were easy to make. The muffins had a slightly denser texture than the bread. They all had a lovely, sunny citrus flavor. The bread (or in one case, muffins) went quickly at the events, and I received lots of compliments.
My husband and I are having some other friends over to the house for coffee next week. I may make the Orange Bread or Muffins again for them (or I may flip through my hundred-year-old cookbooks a little more and find a different recipe to try for them).
Here’s the original recipe:
I used butter for the fat in this recipe. The recipe calls for 4 tablespoons of melted fat. That is the equivalent of 1/4 cup, so I updated the recipe to say 1/4 cup since it is easier to measure.
The bread and muffins are tasty when they are made following the original recipe directions, but are a little less sweet than many modern quick breads. When I updated the recipe, I included an option of adding 1/4 cup sugar. With added sugar, the degree of sweetness is similar to many modern quick bread recipes.
Here’s the recipe updated for modern cooks:
Orange Bread/Muffins (Orange Marmalade Bread/Muffins
This recipe makes 1 large loaf, 3 small loaves, approximately 12 regular muffins, or approximately 36 mini-muffins.
3 cups bread flour
4 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 1/2 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar (optional)
1/4 cup melted butter
3/4 cup orange marmalade
Step 1. Preheat oven to 350° F.
Step 2. Sift the flour, baking powder, and salt into a mixing bowl.
Step 3. In another bowl, beat the egg and stir in the milk.
Step 4. Slowly add the milk and egg mixture to the flour mixture. Add about a quarter of the liquid at a time, and stir between each addition of liquid.
Step 5. If desired, stir in the sugar. Then stir in the melted butter, and finally stir in the orange marmalade.
Step 6. Put into prepared bread pans or muffin tins. Bake a large bread loaf for approximately 40 minutes, small loaves for approximately 30 minutes, and muffins for 15 – 20 minutes, or until lightly browned and a wooden pick comes out clean.
The orange bread sounds like a different, delicious recipe. Years ago, Starbucks made a GF orange muffin that was quite unpleasant. It was quickly discontinued. Yours sounds much better.
Hopefully someone will figure out how to make a tasty GF orange muffin.
How nice to have muffins that don’t require a lot of extra sugar. My husband loves marmalade (think Paddington Bear level 😆), so these would be perfect for him!
I think that your husband would enjoy these – maybe with a little extra marmalade smeared on the muffins when he eats them.
Yes, I believe he would love them. I need to make them for breakfast soon.
What a versatile recipe, I can see why you made it several times already!
I had fun using a variety of different pans to make this recipe.
A great experiment!
Well if Marmalade works I wonder if Lemon Curd would do the job also?
It probably would work to make a nice lemon bread or muffin.
So marmalade is a ‘thing’ in the US too? I always think of it as quintessentially British. It’s not all that popular in Europe.
We’ve found something similar across the two sides of the Atlantic. 🙂 Marmalade is commonly sold in grocery stores here. Most stores carry grape jelly, strawberry jam, orange marmalade, and a few other flavors and varieties.
Whereas strawberry jam is the British favourite, grape jelly is unknown here. Perhaps because we don’t grow grapes (or hadn’t until recently). Mind you, we don’t grow Seville Oranges either. They’re grown in Spain largely for the British market.
If you don’t have grape jelly, what do kids eat? Peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches are a stereotypical kid food in the U.S.
Peanut butter isn’t often paired with anything else here. And I think crunchy is more popular than smooth these days. If anything, a little Marmite (very savoury and salty) would make a change.
It would appear from the newspaper archives that Marian Cole Fisher (later Wittbecker) was considered a nutrition expert. She advertised for Calumet Baking Powder, who supplied her when she baked a wedding cake for President Wilson’s 1915 wedding to Edith Galt. It would also appear than many women and at least one chef, baked a wedding cake. She published several recipe books and gave cooking lessons to “young Mother Hubbards.” I like orange flavor, and occasionally buy orange marmalade, and the muffins sound like my kind of breakfast bread!
It’s interesting that the Calumet Baking Powder Company may have gotten some advertising benefit from supplying the baking powder for President Wilson’s wedding cake. I’ve seen wedding cake recipes in some hundred-year-old cookbooks, so I think that you are right that brides (or their friends or family members) sometimes baked their own wedding cakes back then. The Orange Muffins would be a lovely breakfast bread.
The aroma of this freshly baked orange bread would be a language of its own!
🙂 It does smell nice when it is baking.
For my mother, fat=Crisco!
Probably many of us could say that about our mothers. Crisco was extremely popular for many years. I’ve made several old recipes over the years that explicitly called for Crisco. One old recipe that called for Crisco was Curried Chicken. Here is what I said about Crisco in the post titled Old Fashioned Curried Chicken (Recipe 1).
“This recipe is from a 1919 cookbook titled Recipes for Everyday that was published by Proctor and Gamble. Many of the recipes, including this recipe, call for Crisco shortening which was produced by Proctor and Gamble. At the time, it was considered a new and modern fat. Crisco was first sold in 1911. It was the first shortening made completely from vegetable oil, and was originally made from cottonseed oil. According to the cookbook’s author:
The careful housewife fully understands that her success in cooking absolutely depends upon the quality of the ingredients she chooses. A variable cooking fat like lard, often having unpleasant odor and flavor, cannot give the pleasing, appetizing results insured by a clean, pure, tasteless , odorless, uniform fat like Crisco.“
These look tasty!
They were yummy.
These I might have to try, hubby wouldn’t like them but they would be perfect to mix with banana muffins for a coffee break over Thanksgiving! Besides then I can at least enjoy one or two over the holidays and send the rest home with family.
They would be nice on a tray with banana muffins. I can also picture how it might make a nice presentation to have them on a tray with a dark colored muffin like pumpkin or bran.
I like the concept of your blog, looking at and refining old recipes!
It’s nice to hear that you enjoy this blog. I have a lot of fun pulling together the posts.