New England Farm Stories, circa 1912

Check out this hilarious farm story about salt-rising bread gone wrong.

By Sam Moore
Published on August 25, 2022
article image
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
A loaf of salt-rising bread.

A series of stories published in 1912 by C.A. Stephens, a prolific short story author, concerned four or five cousins, all orphaned due to the Civil War, and who then came to live with Gram and Gramp on their New England farm. This was one of those tales which I’ve compressed to fit into a blog format. — Sam Moore

Mug Bread

“Mug-bread” — the best flour bread ever made, I still believe.

But the making and the baking of it are not easy, and a failure with mug-bread is something awful!

The reader may not know it as mug-bread, for that was a local name, confined largely to our own Maine homestead because Gram always started it in an old tall, white, gold banded mug, that held more than a quart. It has been called milk-yeast bread, patent bread, and salt-rising bread; and it has also been stigmatized by several more offensive epithets, bestowed, I am told, by irate housewives who lacked the skill and genius to make it.

About once in four days, generally at night, Gram would take two tablespoonfuls of corn-meal, ten of boiled milk, and half a teaspoonful of salt, mix them well in that mug, and set it behind the kitchen stove pipe, where it would keep uniformly warm overnight. She covered the mug with an old coffee-pot lid, which just fitted it.

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