GRANDMA MACKAY'S CRANBERRY BREAD

      Title: GRANDMA MACKAY'S CRANBERRY BREAD
  Categories: Quick bread
       Yield: 2 Loaves
  
       2 c  Flour, all-purpose
       1 c  Sugar, granulated
   1 1/2 ts Baking powder
     1/2 ts Baking soda
       1 ts Salt
     3/4 c  Orange juice (juice
            -of one large orange)
       2 tb Shortening
       1 tb Orange peel, grated
            -(one large orange)
       1    Egg, beaten
       1 c  Cranberries, halved
            -or chopped
       1 c  Walnuts or pecans,
            -chopped
  
   Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease the bottom, but not the sides,
   of two small loaf pans.
   
   In a large bowl, sift together all the dry ingredients (flour, sugar,
   baking powder, baking soda and salt). Blend very well.
   
   Mix together the orange juice, orange peel, melted shortening and
   beaten egg. Mix only enough to blend uniformly. Mix in the
   cranberries and the nuts; stir gently. Pour the mixture into the loaf
   pans. Push it to the corners, leaving the center slightly hollow.
   
   Bake about an hour at 350 degrees F.  The loaves are done when a
   toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean. Cool completely
   before cutting. Do not try to serve warm.
   
   NOTES:
   
   *  A festive cranberry-orange nut-bread -- My grandmother MacKay
   clipped this recipe from the 1951 edition of the Pillsbury Bake-Off
   competition recipes, and we've made it a family tradition ever since.
   From time to time my mother and I have both tried to improve on the
   recipe, but it appears that the recipe is already perfect; every
   variation we have ever tried has been disappointing by comparison.
   
   When I was a boy, before the invention of the food processor, making
   this bread required cutting the cranberries in half by hand, with a
   knife, and the person who brought 4 loaves of cranberry bread to the
   family Thanksgiving meal was more welcome than the person who brought
   the turkey. Now, between Baker's Secret loaf pans and Cuisinart
   slicer blades, you can knock out 8 perfect loaves of the stuff while
   watching one episode of Sesame Street.  My grandmother still cuts
   each cranberry in half with a paring knife, and hers still tastes
   better than mine. Yield: 2 small loaves.
   
   *  It takes practice to know when to stop mixing the dough. If you
   mix too much, the bread gets a chewy texture to it, whereas it should
   have a very crumbly consistency, like a muffin or cornbread.
   
   *  It really makes a difference in the texture of this bread to use a
   shortening that is solid at room temperature, like Crisco. It really
   makes a difference in the flavor to use fresh orange-peel and not
   powdered. I prefer walnuts to pecans.
   
   *  It might seem sensible to try to use the same orange for the peel
   and the juice, but it is really more trouble than it is worth to try
   to peel a juiced orange or juice a peeled orange. I usually use two
   oranges and eat the one that I took the peel from.
   
   *  This bread keeps well in the freezer. Specifically, it keeps from
   Thanksgiving to Christmas. It also survives quite well being mailed by
   parcel post from Indiana to Maryland.
   
   : Difficulty:  moderate.
   : Time:  10 minutes preparation if you have a food processor, 2 hours
   baking and cooling.
   : Precision:  Measure carefully.
   
   : Brian Reid
   : DEC Western Research Laboratory, Palo Alto, California, USA
   : reid@decwrl.DEC.COM    -or-
   {ihnp4,ucbvax,decvax,sun,pyramid}!decwrl!reid
   
   : Copyright (C) 1986 USENET Community Trust
[ add our full cookbook to your website ] [ Search The Cookbook ]