Straight To Nana's Raisin Bread Recipe

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Growing up my siblings and I were blessed to have my mother’s mom, Nana, living in our house. A retired schoolteacher she filled her days helping to raise us and cooking mouth-watering dinners and baked goods. But she still loved to teach. From the time I was nine years old, I was chosen to be her designated kitchen assistant and pupil. I was in charge of stirring the pots, kneading the dough and learning the basics of cooking.

Nana had special recipes for every meal, occasion, and season. She canned glistening jars of spicy piccalilli and crisp bread and butter pickles every summer. In the fall she filled the cookie jar with fat, crinkly molasses cookies and baked loaf after loaf of spicy pumpkin bread for the family and lucky neighbors. And her creamy homemade eggnog, topped with freshly grated nutmeg and cherry pecan cake was as traditional as the tinsel topped tree at Christmas time.

But it was Sunday mornings in the winter months that my family loved best. Nana would make her delicious raisin bread and I would get her undivided attention in the kitchen. After church and a quick breakfast, Nana and I would tie on our aprons, shoo the rest of the family out of the kitchen and get to work.

I can still remember the smell of yeast filling the small kitchen with its distinctive fragrance. Nana mixed the plump raisins, mace, sugar, lemon extract, butter, salt and scalded milk mixed together , let it cool down, and then added the sifted flour and beaten eggs. I helped her knead it until it was ready for rising in her favorite bowl. Nana always used her everyday, ordinary yellow ware. Its large size, wide bowl, and glazed surface made it the perfect container for our favorite bread dough.

It was hard to wait for the dough to rise, and then for the dough to rise again in the heavy, dark brown bread pans. We would busy ourselves making Sunday dinner as the bread baked, and I would listen as Nana taught me how to cook. On these Sundays I learned all the basics of cooking as she patiently showed me all she knew. As I got older I had more responsibilities for the dinner, making the gravy or making simple desserts like her spiced apple cake. I learned how to tell when the bread was done by knocking on it and listening for the hollow sound and how cream and egg yolk brushed on the crust would make it dark and shiny.

When the bread was finally finished and it was cool enough to cut we all gathered at the kitchen table for a slice, thick with creamy sweet whipped butter. And all week we were delighted to have raisin toast in the morning.

Years later when I moved my mother gave me Nana’s prized possession: the yellow ware bowl along with her simple wooden recipe box. Inside the box I found all of her original recipe cards including the one for her raisin bread. Just reading the recipes brought back a flood of memories and promises to my family that I would make some of her favorites.

Last winter I revived the tradition of baking bread on Sunday mornings. And when the bread was cool enough to slice I gathered my family to the kitchen table for a thick slice, topped with creamy sweet butter. When the yellow ware bowl is not filled with rising dough it sits next to my favorite cookbooks in my kitchen, a treasured memory of my Nana and her cooking lessons.

Nana's Raisin Bread Recipe:

2 standard packages of dry yeast dissolved in ¼ cup of lukewarm water

1 box of raisins, soaked for 1 hour in 2 c of cool water and then drained well.

2 cups of scalded milk

2 tbsp butter

2 tbsp sugar

1 tsp salt

¼ tsp ground mace

1 tsp lemon extract

2 eggs beaten

6 cups flour (approximately)

1 tbsp cream

1 egg yolk, beaten