Cape Cod Recipes
Old & New

Breads & Baking



Cranberry Bog Harvest In the Fall, in Mass.

You don't need a whole lot of expensive equipment to turn out some fine bread either. In fact, the 'breads' that come out of those highly touted bread machines are plain awful. When you think about it, how much fancy gear did your great grandmother need?

A bowl, a cookie sheet and an oven will do , and you can make some perfectly fine bread with no more than that. A step up from that is using an old fashioned Bread Bucket like I did for years. No more than a dough hook securely mounted to a bucket and an arrangement for clamping it to the kitchen table, it'll give you a place to mix your basics, knead your dough and let it rise

A step up is what we're using now: the KitchenAid mixer. We highly reccommend these for serious cooks, as they will handle anything you throw at 'em. They have been making these for who knows how long, they will knead your bread dough, assemble your pie crust, whip cream, make sausage, anything you like.

Bread pans: we like the nonstick variety and give them a coating of shortening anyhow. The old style black iron pans are fine too. Pie plates? The heavy oven-safe glass variety are the way to go.

A scraper and a dough cutter, some cookie cutters and a doughnut cutter will round out your arsenal for baking, plus a few other goodies you'll find you like over time.

Ingredients

Flour: you'll need three kinds of flour; the 'all purpose' for pies and sauces and general use, bread flour like the high gluten King Arthur we like for breads and pasta and then there's cake flour for...well, cakes.We get our flour ( and sugar) in big bags at the local restaurant supply house and store it in plastic tubs.

In fact, many of your necessities can be had in restaurant supply houses. The packaging isn't as fancy, the quantities are large and you have to figure out where to store 'em, but they are at least as good as the supermarket versions and often better. For instance, honey, molasses, flour and yeast as we mentioned, corn meal, oils like canola and olive oil, you name it, they have it.

Sweeteners: some white breads and pies should have white sugar, but for bread and such we get old fashioned and use molasses much of the time. It also acts as a bit of a preservative, letting your fresh bread stay fresh longer.

The wild berries found in the New World,  called "sky-coloured billberries." They were bluer than the bilberries or whortleberriesin  England,  the Indians would dry them in the sun and sell them to the English by the bushell. The English colonists used bushels of the dried berries in place of traditional currants in their puddings, gruels, and fruitcakes, and in summertime they doused fresh berries in sweetened spiced milk or sherry for "Summer Dish."

Wild berries are often wildly named. In the west country of England the bilberry,  mistook our native blueberry was also called "whortleberry" or "hurtleberry" for its blue color, which reminded some of "hurted" or "bruised" flesh.

In America the names hurtleberry and whortleberry were conflated into "huckleberry," another wild blue that is close kin to the true blueberry (a member of the Vaccinium family). Huckleberry , as we all know, later came to personify American wildness and the name stuck. Imagine how different the course of American literature and lives would be if Twain had written The Adventures of Whortleberry Finn.